Re: More vertical spacing confusion

[Adam Spiers]

On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 11:15 PM, Keith OHara <address@hidden> wrote:
> Adam Spiers <lilypond-user <at> adamspiers.org> writes:
>> I have a piece of music which should easily fit on one page, and
>> indeed does until I change the paper size from A4 to US Letter, at
>> which point the final system spills over onto a second page.
>
> You can
> \paper {
>  system-system-spacing #'basic-distance = 8 % default was 12
>  page-count = #1
>
> The first line because the way you use the rhythmic staff as the first staff
> you don't want that much distance to the system above.
>
> The second line because Lilypond still doesn't break pages properly, so just
> help her.

Thanks very much for the response, although I hope I don't sound too
ungrateful by saying that that wasn't quite the answer I was hoping
for :)

Setting page-count to 1 does indeed get rid of the extra page,
although it also causes warnings:

    Preprocessing graphical objects...
    programming error: number of pages is out of bounds
    continuing, cross fingers
    Fitting music on 1 page...
    programming error: number of pages is out of bounds
    continuing, cross fingers
    Drawing systems...

It's a rather unpleasant brute force approach to the problem, and I
would much prefer to understand the details of the vertical spacing
algorithm so that I can control it better when dealing with multiple
pages.

To this end I'd really appreciate if anyone can answer my original
questions regarding the arrow annotations, extent-estimate, mysterious
vertical gaps etc., and also give more information around your
assertion that Lilypond doesn't break pages properly.  Do you mean
there are known bugs specifically with the 2.15.x series, or just with
every version?  Are they likely to be fixed any time soon?

Many thanks again!
Adam