Re: setting the number of pages for a score

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

[I'm taking the liberty of CC-ing the devel list.]

Joe Neeman wrote:
> > If I understand corrrectly, your page breaker tries to put everything 
> > on one page by unless you say \allowPageBreak, which does not seem 
> > like a sensible default.
>
> Two pages, actually, but yes. I think this is the only possible default 
> (but of course it should handle problems more gracefully). If you 
> actually want to restrict the position of possible page turns (to a 
> small number, usually), I think the only possibility is to assume that 
> page turns are not allowed unless explicitly marked (or determined 
> automatically as being possible turns if there is a good way of doing 
> that).

Can't we use some sort of penalty mechanism, where allowPageBreak is a 
huge bonus, so it automatically has the effect of forcing a page-break 
where  specified (and disallowing in the vicinity, since two page-breaks 
in close succession lead to very stretched pages).

Then we could automatically assign bonuses to rests, depending on their 
length.  If you want to be tempo-independent, you could take the length 
relative to the average or longest rest in the piece.

> Since enabling this page-breaker requires user intervention anyway, I 
> think it's ok to require them to also mark possible page turns.
>
> Maybe it wasn't clear, but I don't propose this page breaker to 
> _replace_ the original page breaker. This one is designed to do page 
> turns nicely and I can think of many examples of music where bad page 
> turns don't matter (anything where you have your hands free, for 
> example) and the original page-breaker would be faster and more suitable.

Maybe I wasn't clear, but experience shows that solutions that aren't 
switched on by default get used seldom. Consequently they develop 
bit-rot and bugs as we refactor the rest of the code around it. That's 
why we make sure that we don't duplicate code. If performance is a 
problem, we should devise some sort of fall back mode, which does use 
the same code, but takes some more efficient short-cuts.

Come to think of it, the current page-breaking and line-breaking 
algorithms are actually two instances of the same problem, and if we can 
 unify their code, I'm all for it.    If we do that, adding a 
restrained breaker would give us restrained page-breaking for free :)

--
 Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen