Re: Aligning single systems?

[David Kastrup]

"Boris Shingarov" <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.  

Well, the obvious algorithm for aligning lines in Lilypond would be to
place them baselineskip apart, unless their skylines come closer than
lineskiplimit, in which case their skylines are placed lineskip apart.
Or at least, that's what serves TeX rather well, apart from it not
seeing skylines but rather bounding boxes.

-- 
David Kastrup