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Vertical spacing

The height of each system is determined automatically by lilypond, to keep 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 from its, then you could set

       \property Staff.minimumVerticalExtent = #'(-4 . 4)
     
This sets the vertical size of the current staff to 4 staff-space 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. you could also make the staff larger at the bottom by setting it to (-6 . 4). The default value is (-6 . 6).

Vertical aligment of staves is handled by the VerticalAlignment object, which lives at Score level.

The piano staves are handled a little differently: to make cross-staff beaming work correctly, it necessary that the distance between staves is fixed. This is also done with a VerticalAlignment

object, created in PianoStaff , but a forced distance is set. This is done with the object property #'forced-distance. If you want to override this, use a \translator block as follows:

       \translator {
         \PianoStaffContext
         VerticalAlignment \override #'forced-distance = #9
       }
     
This would bring the staves together at a distance of 9 staff spaces, and again this is measured from the center line of each staff.
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Copyright (c) 1997--2002 Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

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This page was built from LilyPond-1.7.14 (development-branch) by

Buchan Milne <(address unknown)>, Thu Mar 6 21:11:35 2003 CET.