Re: Can Lilypond export separate pdfs?

[Mats Bengtsson]

Arvid Grøtting wrote:
> Mats Bengtsson <mats.bengtsson <at> ee.kth.se> writes:
>
>   
> > If you want to make a LaTeX document that contains some scores, I strongly
> > recommend you to use lilypond-book.
> >     
>
> Is lilypond-book actively developed?
>
> I'm especially thinking of stuff like actually using page-based vertical and
> horizontal layout with a lilypond-book-included score; last I checked all these
> wonderful enhancements were lost within the context of lilypond-book...
>
>   
You are right that the handling of inter-score line distance, for 
example, is lost since
each score line is generated as a separate EPS/PDF file which is then 
included into
the LaTeX document using \includegraphics{...}.
However, this is not necessarily a bad choice. The problem is 
complicated since you
have many different situations to handle. If you have a short musical 
example, then
you typically want to include it as a figure somewhere in the document 
and LilyPond
should clearly not do any page breaking or other page layout. Even if 
you have a
long score that fills several pages, you may want to use LaTeX to 
typeset the titling
at the top of the score, so it's not obvious what page height LilyPond 
should use for the
first page, if we added the possibility to include scores page by page 
instead of
score line by score line in the text document.

I hope you realize that you can play tricks by defining the 
\betweenLilyPondSystem
function in LaTeX if you want to modify the spacing between systems. I 
also hope you
know that you can include the full score in a \book block if you want 
the full score
to be included as a single EPS/PDF into the document, which means that 
LilyPond
does all the layout decisions as usual (which of course is limited to 
the case where the
score is not longer than a single page).

   /Mats