Re: 4 hands piano pieces book

[David Wright]

On Sun 08 May 2016 at 19:13:37 (+0200), Jacques Menu Muzhic wrote:
> Would dynamics parts dedicated to breaks and pageBreaks, stored in variables, 
> be useful? They might contain only spacer rests and such breaks, and be used 
> by Piano I and Piano II parts.
> 
> I use this satisfactorily to produce director and musicians parts, with the 
> same breaks in the first drafts to facilitate cross checking of the LP input 
> code.

This seems to be the mainstream way of handling breaks and pageBreaks
(though I hadn't thought of specifically using a Dynamics context).

> One would still have to place things in the right order in the input file to 
> build the left and right pages, of course.

I wouldn't try to build the score in display order at all. In fact,
if you want to be able to start a new piece halfway down the page, I
think you'd get into a real mess.

I would typeset the primo and secondo in separate scores, using \books
to write separate PDF files.

I would use breakbefore = ##t to get the titling out of the way on
page 1.
 
Consequently, primo would have its first music on page 2. All
subsequent page breaks would be written:

\pageBreak % skips to the next page...
\markup { " " }
\pageBreak % ...and that leaves a page blank (except the page number).

so that a blank page is left for secondo, and every odd page is blank.
(Probably put this construction in a variable.)

Secondo would start with an immediate extra:

\pageBreak % skips to the next page...
\markup { " " }
\pageBreak % ...and that leaves a page blank (except the page number).

so that its first music is on page 3. Continue as with primo, so every
even page is blank.

If this looks familiar, it's because this is a rehash of
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2016-05/msg00069.html

Burst the two PDFs into two directories and delete all the empty pages
(ie every other file). Move the remaining files from either directory
into the other. Concatenate the PDFs exactly as before, except now the
output file is called interleaved-output.pdf instead of
decimated-output.pdf.

> [A.N.Other] said:

> > The initial problem is getting the page breaks in sync.
> > Once you've achieved that (presumably by manually adding page breaks) you 
> > can easily create two separate pdfs and use an external tool to create the 
> > bound volume.

Write your page breaks into *one* variable. Where you give this variable
to \new Dynamics in the \score structures, prefix *only* secondo with
an extra copy of the three-liner above. This approach guarantees the same
pagebreaks for the two players, but pushes secondo forward by one page.

Cheers,
David.