Re: Generating cropped PDFs

[David Wright]

On Tue 12 Jul 2016 at 14:29:41 (+0200), Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> On 12 July 2016 at 13:32, David Kastrup wrote:
> > Mojca Miklavec writes:
> >> I would occasionally like to create cropped PDFs (either entirely
> >> cropped or with some reasonable/configurable margin) without having to
> >> guess the size of the paper for each snippet.
> >>
> >> I found a page which seems to contain reasonable answers:
> >>
> >> <http://superuser.com/questions/96970/lilypond-is-there-a-way-to-auto-crop-the-paper>
> >>
> >> but:
> >>
> >> 1.) Even if both -dpreview and \include "lilypond-book-preamble.ly"
> >> from the first answer create cropped PDFs, the fonts are screwed up (I
> >> get some very weird ugly font). I'm not sure if this is a bug or not.
> >
> > 2.19.45 got a really bad font bug when creating multiple output files.
> > A fix is in the queue.  Revert back to 2.19.44 for now.
> 
> Thank you, that solved the problem.

That may solve the font problem but, having tried these two methods
out, I didn't find them particularly satisfactory.

-dpreview seemed to crop the output but with different amounts of
whitespace on each edge. I use a margin of one bp in pdfcrop (zero
makes previewing difficult because I don't like the print touching
the window's frame) and that's what I get.

lilypond-book-preamble.ly decomposes the page into fragments and then
puts them back together, but not correctly. For example, it'll rip the
opus off the music and then put it back together with more whitespace
in between.

The great advantage of pdfcrop as I see it is that, having got LP to
lay out the page exactly as you want it (which can be no mean feat),
it can't disturb it. And you don't have to inject anything into the
LP source or functionality. This last point is an argument against
my using the newer one-line/page settings, though you might have
success there.

Cheers,
David.