Make more tunes fit on one page

[captbaritone]

Reduce sizes of staffs, space between staff and more - @veltzer

Could we implement a test that checked which tunes spilled over onto multiple pages? That would be a great way to keep confidence that this important layout issue is take into consideration when making global layout changes like song footers/titles etc.

[veltzer]

AFAIK lilypond only decides how many pages a tune will take when doing the layout. So you have to actually run lilypond to get the info.

And we also have to remember that some tunes will not fit on a single page ("Desafinado" by Jobim comes to mind...). So we also have to think about those.

[captbaritone]

It's also worth considering that once we get the build system in place, there will probably be 100s of combinations of options that could slightly affect the layout. I suppose we should see if we can find general layout solutions rather than finding tunes that look wrong and fixing them manually for one specific layout.

It would be awesome it Lilypond had options where you could have it optimize for full pages.

[veltzer]

Actually, I had run into trouble with that. Lilypond's algorithm for layout ran into problems when trying to render the whole book so I put a page break before each tune. Without it, the rendering of the book took forever...:) (I'm digging this up from memory - so this info may be out of date now). When you put a page break you're sort of telling lilypond - don't worry about doing full book optimizations and about where each tune will start, I'll tell you that explcitly which makes lilypond run a lot faster...

My conclusions were that liliypond was not really made for a 200-300 page book but only for individual pieces. This may have changed in the time that passed but I'm guessing it didn't because not a whole lot of people use liliypond to render whole books...