Re: NR 4.1.4 ragged bottom and vertical spacing

[Noeck]

Hi Federico and Simon,

>> %%%%%
>> If a page has a ragged bottom, the resulting distance is the largest of:
>>
>>    basic-distance,
>>    minimum-distance, and
>>    padding plus the smallest distance necessary to eliminate collisions
>> %%%%%%
>>
>> Does it mean that it will take the largest value between those three?
> 
> Yes.

Depends on how you define largest value. Not in the sense of
 max(basic-distance, minimum-distance, padding)
because they measure different distances from different points.
I tried to illustrate it here:
http://joramberger.de/files/LilypondSpacing.pdf

So the final distance is the basic-distance (which can be stretched and
shrunk), but not smaller than minimum-distance. Depending on the
available space, it can more or less than basic-distance, but never
smaller than minimum-distance. And in addition not so small, that
objects from the upper staff are closer to objects from the lower staff
than padding.

In stead of the maximum of these properties it is more the maximum of
derived quantities:

max(basic * stretching factor, minimum, padding + extent of skylines)

In particular the stretching factor is missing from the reasoning in the
docs above.

>> I read the french translation to see how it was interpreted and it
>> seems to suggest that the distance is the _sum_ of the three values
>> (if I understand correctly.. my french is very basic).
> 
> To me it reads like an appropriate rendition. French ‘maximum’ would
> exactly correspond to English ‘largest’.

Cheers,
Joram