Re: Lyrics above staff height inconsistent

[Aaron Hill]

On 2021-11-10 7:46 am, Adam Good wrote:
> Dear List,
>
> Here's a question I'm sure has been asked and answered often. I much 
> prefer
> lyrics below the staff but if I had to, in the example below, what is
> causing the lyrics on the 2nd and 3rd stafflines to be higher than
> staffline 1? Playing with:
>
> \override VerticalAxisGroup.nonstaff-relatedstaff-spacing.padding
>
> ...doesn't quite deliver for me.

Padding is only one element of spacing.  You need to consider 
basic-distance and minimum-distance, perhaps also stretchability.

LilyPond will try to accommodate basic-distance though it does not force 
it to be exact, as it may compress or stretch vertical spacing when 
fitting music to the page.  While minimum-distance does define a strict 
lower bound for the spacing, elements still could be stretched apart.  
Both basic- and minimum-distance are measured from baseline-to-baseline, 
whereas padding factors in the skylines of the content to ensure a 
specified distance between "ink".

The default spacing for Lyrics is a basic-distance of 5.5, padding of 
0.5, and stretchability of 1.  minimum-distance is unspecified, which I 
believe defaults to zero.

In your example, LilyPond could not accommodate the 5.5 basic-distance 
for the top line of Lyrics and reduced it to the minimum; however, 
factoring in padding results in it being a little further away.  Since 
there seems to be quite a bit of paper space available, it is odd that 
the basic-distance could not be satisfied.  Perhaps there is a subtle 
bug in the layout logic.

The easy fix is to specify minimum-distance as well.  If you like 5.5 as 
a basic-distance, just match that value.


-- Aaron Hill