Re: Page breaks, was: something else

[Erik Sandberg]

On Monday 22 August 2005 10.17, Mats Bengtsson wrote:
> 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.

I think the problem is that the current algorithm attempts to create as few 
lines as possible. So if a page doesn't contain much music, lily will produce 
few systems with tight spacing, rather than many systems with wide spacing.

-- 
Erik