Re: Can Lilypond export separate pdfs?

[Arvid Grøtting]

2007/5/3, Mats Bengtsson <address@hidden>:

> You are right that the handling of inter-score line distance, for
> example, is lost since
> each score line is generated as a separate EPS/PDF file which is then
> included into
> the LaTeX document using \includegraphics{...}.
> However, this is not necessarily a bad choice. The problem is
> complicated since you
> have many different situations to handle.

I'm very well aware of that.

> If you have a short musical
> example, then
> you typically want to include it as a figure somewhere in the document
> and LilyPond
> should clearly not do any page breaking or other page layout.

True, and used this way lilypond-book works excellently.

> Even if
> you have a
> long score that fills several pages, you may want to use LaTeX to
> typeset the titling
> at the top of the score, so it's not obvious what page height LilyPond
> should use for the
> first page, if we added the possibility to include scores page by page
> instead of
> score line by score line in the text document.

Good point.  However, if you do import a lilypond file with headers,
the headers will be included in the import.  If you assume a match
between the available vertical space within a page of the LaTeX
document and the space declared available within the lilypond file,
*and* you keep the relevant LaTeX pages free of other stuff eating up
vertical space, you *could* allow Lilypond to do page-filling when
called from lilypond-book as well.

So, how do you know which scores can be page-stretched and which
should have the current behaviour?  I think ragged-last-bottom is a
good indicator: If set to ##f, we could safely assume that the user
wants all kinds of page-based stretching.

> I hope you realize that you can play tricks by defining the
> \betweenLilyPondSystem
> function in LaTeX if you want to modify the spacing between systems.

...typically like this:

\newcommand{\betweenLilyPondSystem}[1]{\vfill}

> I also hope you
> know that you can include the full score in a \book block if you want
> the full score
> to be included as a single EPS/PDF into the document, which means that
> LilyPond
> does all the layout decisions as usual (which of course is limited to
> the case where the
> score is not longer than a single page).

That's quite a limitation.

BTW, for an example of a document where I chose not to use
lilypond-book because the page-based output is vastly better (IMHO),
check out my edition of Edvard Grieg's "Album for Mandssang" (album
for male song):

http://www.lulu.com/content/737011

(In the "useless trivia" section, even the cover for that project was
typeset using Lilypond, although only as a way to start Guile to write
postscript.)

Also, please note that this isn't meant so much as criticism of
lilypond-book.  It's just that Lilypond itself has taken a great leap
forward with the new page breaking algorithms, especially with
ragged-last-bottom = ##f.  (The vastly improved collision avoidance is
what switched me to 2.11, though.)  Go Joe!  :-)

--

Arvid