Page breaks, was: something else

[Mats Bengtsson]

Erik Sandberg wrote:
> On Thursday 18 August 2005 14.13, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
>
> > Erik Sandberg wrote:
> >
> > > Did you try \pageBreak? :) IMHO, perfect page breaks is one of the things
> > > that
> >
> > \pageBreak, did we have that? :-)
> >
> > Yes, I tried, but I thought it was a lot of hassle. It would ease up
> > things if lily produced line breaks in places where a page break is
> > sensible.
>
>
> I have been thinking about this issue. There are two problems with "sensible" 
> page breaks:
> 1. Page breaks are only critical when you need to turn pages. If you don't 
> need to turn a page, it's better to use the current algorithm.
> Page breaks _often_ happen every second pagebreak, but not always. (sometimes 
> you may have 3 visible pages at once, sometimes 2). Also, it's always unclear 
> whether the first page will be a left or right page so you'd have to 
> communicate that somehow. That communication would probably be about as much 
> work as inserting a \pageBreak.
> 2. When there is no good page break (such as in orchestral scores), no effort 
> should be done to find the 'optimal' one, we should just be greedy (this can 
> of course be done)
>
> For these reasons, I would vote strongly against having clever pagebreaks 
> turned on by default. It could be nice as an option, though.

Finding clever page breaks is certainly a very tricky business, where
a human often can do a better job. However, a first step could be to
try to automatically adjust the line breaks between the user specified
page breaks to provide a pleasing layout. As far as I can remember, the
current line breaking algorithm only considers one line at a time.

   /Mats