Re: Aligning single systems?

[Joe Neeman]

On Sat, 2010-05-08 at 07:20 -0400, Boris Shingarov wrote:
> 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.

The page _layout_ (not breaking) can already take skylines into account,
so it shouldn't be too much work to add skyline information to
markups/titles. Of course, if you have many of these markup lines with
scores on a single page, then you will end up with height-estimation
problems and possibly a large space at the bottom of the page.

Cheers,
Joe