Re: Does the optimal-page-breaker work?

[Keith OHara]

On Mon, 27 May 2013 00:19:06 -0700, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:

> I'm successfully using ly:page-turn-breaking with an organ piece,
> fitting about 200 bars on 11 pages.

Good. Do you let LilyPond find page-turns at rests, or put in \allowPageTurn at 
every potential turn?

The page-turn-breaker does seem to do what it promises, but I have in the past 
found it a frustrating waste of time compared with choosing my own breaks.  
Looking through mutopiaproject and Jay's horndude77-open-scores I see most 
often a commented-out % ly:page-turn-breaking, as if others give up on it as 
well.   Most often I am frustrated that it puts too little music on pages.  
Maybe I just need to learn to use it correctly.

The reported bugs regarding page-spacing suggest that that the global approach 
taken by LilyPond is surprising to people, and I suppose also frustrating or 
people would not complain.  For example, I would prefer if LilyPond treated the 
spacing between forced page-breaks, or her chosen page-turns, as independent 
local optimizations, with no effort to keep horizontal spacing consistent 
across a page-turn.

If we find a couple examples where LilyPond does a good job at 
line/page-breaking, and also confirmation of where LilyPond fails like I tried 
in my last email, we have a better chance of removing the strange behavior 
while keeping the good.

Does the default (ly:optimal-breaking) do anything good?