page margins

[Noeck]

Hi,

what is the reason that the default margins are so small?

They are (top/botton, left/right | inner/outer in mm):
5/6, 10/10 | 10/20

If I compare to printed scores, they are usually larger:
Edition Peters:  10/12, 17/17
Boosey & Hawkes: 11/24, 14/14

I understand the goal to save space for the music content.
But there are some drawbacks:

- most printers cannot print so close to the paper edge
  (especially top/bottom)
    - this either cuts into the printed page content
    - or requires to scale the content while printing
- it looks too squeezed (cf. the simple example below)
- it is non-standard compared to most publishers

In addition the top-markup-spacing is 0 which makes the title look very
squashed to the top. I would prefer something around 4 or 5 mm (or one
text line height).

I see that this has been discussed before in 2009:
http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/default-margins-tp44740p44741.html
with margin measurments for many publishers but without a visible
conclusion for Lilypond.
There is now (or some time ago) a Mutopia discussion whether larger
margins should be enforced or not:
https://github.com/chrissawer/The-Mutopia-Project/issues/141
but I think if LilyPond delivered printable default settings, this would
be the best solution.

I have no reference book on this at hand, but my proposal is:
10/15 15/15 | 10/20
and a top-markup-spacing basic-distance of about 4\mm.

Could this be added to the issue tracker?

Cheers,
Joram



% show the header placement
\version "2.18.0"

\header {
  title = "A Default Title"
  composer = "The Composer"
  opus = "Op. 1"
  piece = "Part 1"
}

\paper {
  % top-markup-spacing.basic-distance = 3
}

{ a1 \break a }