Re: Dubious recommendation about ragged-last-bottom in spacing.itely

[Pavel Roskin]

Quoting David Kastrup <address@hidden>:

> > 2012/2/10 Pavel Roskin <address@hidden>:
> > > I believe the opposite should be suggested.  Large scores should set
> > > ragged-last-bottom to false.  For a large score, it's easy to fill a
> > > whole number of pages without much distortion.  Doing so increases
> > > readability of the piece without increasing the number of the page
> > > turns.
>
> It depends on how well our penalty system works.  If you fill three
> pages anyway, you want your breaks at places where a page turn makes
> good sense.  Even if one page is short.  If LilyPond has no way to
> figure out one page break being better than another, it might as well
> spread the material evenly over pages.  But other than that, I don't see
> that filling the last page should necessarily "increase readability".
>
> Just having choices #f and #t is also not really optimal.

I agree that having more choices would be good.  But since there is a  
suggestion in the documentation, let's suggest the best of what we can  
offer.  Now that the issue 2102 has been fixed, ragged-last-bottom=#f  
can be a reasonable suggestion for large pieces with no manual page  
breaks.  It's still a suggestion; it can be safely ignored.  It's not  
even the default.

Speaking of the defaults, the default system-to-system distance is too  
short for my taste.  It may be OK it would save a page turn.  However,  
it's used on the last page with ragged-last-bottom=#t even if there is  
enough space on the page to use the same system-to-system distance as  
on the previous page.  Often the last page has the worst layout  
compared to previous pages.

--
Regards,
Pavel Roskin