Next: , Previous: Page layout, Up: Global layout



7.5.4 Vertical spacing

The height of each system is determined automatically. To prevent systems from bumping into each other, some minimum distances are set. By changing these, you can put staves closer together, and thus put more systems onto one page.

Normally staves are stacked vertically. To make staves maintain a distance, their vertical size is padded. This is done with the property minimumVerticalExtent. It takes a pair of numbers, so if you want to make it smaller than its default #'(-4 . 4), then you could set

\set Staff.minimumVerticalExtent = #'(-3 . 3)

This sets the vertical size of the current staff to 3 staff spaces on either side of the center staff line. The argument of minimumVerticalExtent is interpreted as an interval, where the center line is the 0, so the first number is generally negative. The staff can be made larger at the bottom by setting it to (-6 . 4).

To change the amount of space between systems, use betweensystemspace. A score with only one staff is still considered to have systems, so setting betweensystemspace will be much more useful than changing minimumVerticalExtent.

\layout {
  betweensystemspace = 10\mm
}

See also

Internals: Vertical alignment of staves is handled by the VerticalAlignment (lilypond-internals) object.

Bugs

minimumVerticalExtent is syntactic sugar for setting minimum-Y-extent of the VerticalAxisGroup (lilypond-internals) of the current context. It can only be changed score wide.

Read comments on this page, or add one.

This page is for LilyPond-2.5.11 (development-branch).

Report errors to <bug-lilypond@gnu.org>.

Other languages: English.
Using automatic language selection.