Re: Alignment of full-page scores in text documents

[David Wright]

On Mon 29 Jan 2018 at 09:03:46 (+0100), Urs Liska wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm trying to figure out the best setting for page margins for mixed
> text/music documents. The task is to automatically set the margins
> in LilyPond depending on a LaTeX document where full-page scores are
> included.
> 
> We have the horizontal margins more or less fixed, by default
> LilyPond's staff symbol will exactly match LaTeX's linewidth. When
> naively setting LilyPond's vertical margins to those of the text the
> result is (expectedly) rather ppor, as you can see here:
> https://github.com/jperon/lyluatex/issues/29#issuecomment-361159545.
> What I would basically want to achieve is mathing the outermost
> *staff lines* with the text's type area.
> 
> When manually trying different values I found that I would like the
> topmost staffline align not with the actual margin but the X-height
> of the corresponding text. This can be seen here:
> https://github.com/jperon/lyluatex/issues/29#issuecomment-361162799
> 
> On that same image the bottom staff line is aligned to the baseline
> of the text, and I'm not sure if that is the right choice. Somehow
> the score visually looks lower than the text, and I wonder whether
> there should be a similar amount of padding like at the top margin.
> But of course there is no "natural" reference point here.
> 
> What is your opinion on this issue?

Your musical example is very sparsely decorated and has just the one
poppy on the top system and its strine mate on the bottom. What
happens when slurs and dynamics etc are added? It could make what the
*eye* considers as the boundary of the music shift quite dramatically.
Add to that a deep final phrase in the bass line and you could be
straying far into the margin.

Cheers,
David.