Re: lyluatex and distance between systems

[David Wright]

On Thu 05 Nov 2015 at 18:11:52 (+0100), Marc Hohl wrote:
> I use the lyluatex package for my latest project. Everything looks fine,
> but unfortunately lyluatex does not support \preLilyPondExample,
> \postLilyPondExample and \betweenLilyPondSystem, respectively.
> 
> I want to control the distance between staves, and adding a padding
> below the lyrics does not work, since the Lilypond output is cropped
> line by line, ignoring the padding AFAIK.
> 
> Is there a way to manually or even better automatically insert an
> invisible spacer in the lyrics at the beginning of each new line to
> increase the spacing?

I have stooped to adding extra verses, eg

\addlyrics { \versei }
\addlyrics { \verseii }
\addlyrics { \spacer }
\addlyrics { \spacer }

where the spacer verse might be

spacer = \lyricmode {
  \NBSP _ _ _ _ _ _ _
  \NBSP _ _ _ _ _
  \NBSP _ _ _ _ _ _ _
  \NBSP _ _ _ _ _
}

for an 8686-metre hymn for example.

NBSP = \lyricmode { " " } % non-breakable space

It's not automatic, particularly for "prose" music where the number of
syllables per line is variable. However, it's flexible: you can change
some of the NBSPs back to _ and only pad certain systems (where, for
example, an extra bit of bass lyrics below the staves is getting too
close to the following system. That's tricker to do with
\override VerticalAxisGroup #'minimum-Y-extent = #'(<N> . <N>)

If your cropper is intelligent enough to recognise NBSP as whitespace
and zap it, then there's always the standby

invisibledot = \lyricmode { \once \override LyricText.font-size = #-19 "." }

Cheers,
David.