Re: Engraving essay questions and RFC

[Joe Neeman]

On Sat, 2009-10-24 at 14:01 -0600, Andrew Hawryluk wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 8:58 PM, Joe Neeman <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-10-07 at 22:18 -0600, Andrew Hawryluk wrote:
> >> - LilyPond 2.13.5 currently has a vertical spacing problem (no padding
> >> between staves).
> >
> > how about this:
> > \layout {
> >  \context {
> >    \PianoStaff
> >    \override StaffGrouper #'between-staff-spacing #'padding = #0.5
> >  }
> > }
> >
> > If you find a good value, I'll make it the default.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Joe
> 
> I propose #'padding = #1 as the default value for PianoStaff.

Thanks, pushed.

> Are there other default values in the new spacing engine that need to
> be selected, perhaps by referencing good published scores? Overall,
> I'm very impressed with the new layout algorithms, and I'd be happy to
> pitch in a bit of score measuring if it will help to get the constants
> right.

Basically, almost all of the default values for the new spacing engine
were chosen almost arbitrarily by me. This includes stretchable space,
stretchability, padding and minimum distance for a lot of different
situations (between staves in the same staff group, between staves in
different staff groups, between systems, from systems to titles, etc).
Some of these values could be established by examining scores (padding,
for example, and maybe minimum distance). For others (like stretchable
space), it's harder because you can't measure them directly from
finished scores.

Perhaps some benchmarking is in order. If you, or someone else, has an
example of a score that gets bad spacing together with a well typeset
reference copy of the score then it could be used to fine-tune
parameters.

Cheers,
Joe