Re: Aligning single systems?

[Boris Shingarov]

On Fri, 07 May 2010 21:53:54  0200, David Kastrup  wrote:
> If we had something like that, one would not need to meddle with
 > paddings and the resulting spurious spacings.

Like in the old joke of a composition student being given advice to
take the easy route and just write his professor's Praeludien
backwards: "I already tried, Songs by Schubert come out".
 
I already tried a number of ways to improve the vertical alignment of
embedded scores, including \vcenter.  The resulting alignment is good,
but having good alignment does NOT solve the spurious spacing.  The
problem of spurious spacing is that the shape of the staff is
approximated by its bounding box.  In the case of text, such
approximations work ok, because the optical "density distribution" is
reasonably close to rectangular.  But for music, it is far from
rectangular, we have things sticking out of the staff, like the tip of
the G clef.  So visually, the white space above a staff begins from
the 5th line, but the machine starts measuring it from the highest
point of the clef.