Re: Pre-Release: Slave Songs of the United States

[Marcus Brinkmann]

At Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:13:03 -0300,
"Han-Wen Nienhuys" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> 2007/6/12, Marcus Brinkmann <address@hidden>:
> 
> > All type-setting of the original 1867 text is finished and in very
> > good shape.  Future improvements will be done in other areas, like a
> > new preface, illustrations, MIDI files, etc.  This pre-release,
> > although quite usable in its own right, is particularly directed at
> > people who might be willing to take a look at the source code and tell
> > me what I could do better.
> 
> And a typographic nit: the margins seem rather on the small side.
> Have you done the page layout yourself?  I recommend copying margins
> from reknowned publications.

I know :( I made an early decision to stick to DIN A5, as most pieces
are short and this also comes close to the original format.  I did not
take into account that Lilypond has wider spacing than the original,
and I ended up enlarging the used area of a page until I got line
breaks resembling the original automatically.

It's a flaw, but re-flowing all songs is a lot (!) of work.  I am just
happy I got all songs on one or at most two pages with some effort,
and that I have line breaks which mostly make sense (an even number of
measures per line, etc).

Maybe it would have been better to tweak Lilypond's spacing to
compensate for the smaller page size, but that's over my head.  I
suppose Lilypond already tunes to the smaller staff size, so I am not
sure that's the way one would want to go anyway.

Work arounds: Printing on a larger (non-standard) paper size or
shrinking the pages before printing.

I guess the moral of the story is that DIN A5 is not a good page size
for staffsize 18.

BTW, thanks for the help on the font issue, I will apply the
techniques and see how much it helps.

Thanks,
Marcus