proposed enhancement to vertical stretching logic

[Andrew Hawryluk]

Reinhold started a recent thread on -user about some problems with the
current vertical spacing behaviour, particularly when stretching large
systems to fill a page:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2008-06/msg00309.html

To summarize, vertical stretching should be smart enough to add extra
space where it is needed most rather than equally distributing it
between all the staves.

After giving it some thought, I believe that the desired behaviour can
be achieved by a system of 'pre-stretched' springs. Since I'm not
fluent enough in LP internals to send it as C++, it's in English &
pseudocode. It's too big for the email attachment limit, so I have
posted it here:
http://www.musicbyandrew.ca/springs.pdf

I realize that it may be too late in the 2.11 development cycle to
start in on something like this right away, but I'd like to hear what
you think and how hard it would be to accomplish. I'm very excited
about the way this reasonably simple model could accomplish all the
objectives of vertical stretching.

I'm looking forward to hear what you have to say!

If you want, I have also posted the LaTeX file and the figure image:
http://www.musicbyandrew.ca/springs.tex
http://www.musicbyandrew.ca/prestretchedsprings.png

Andrew