>> While playing around with adding parts to LilyPond's Notation
>> Reference, I got the attached layout in the ToC. As can be seen,
>> there is a vertical gap corresponding to approx. 8 lines(!) at the
>> bottom of page vi; I've never noticed such a large gap before in any
>> Texinfo document. [...]
>
> I believe it is due to the use of \raggedbottom (used in the
> \startcontents macro.) A page break before a chapter entry is
> prioritised and space at the end of the page allows this. You could
> try playing around with the value in our definition of
> \raggedbottom:
>
> \def\raggedbottom{\advance\topskip by 0pt plus60pt \r@ggedbottomtrue}
>
>
> 60pt would be about 6 lines of 10-point text but the -300 bonus for
> line breaking would allow somewhat more. (The cube root of 300/100
> is 1.44 so possibly about 44% more - although I don't have a great
> knowledge of TeX's exact page breaking calculations.)
>
> We could reduce this 60pt value if you find a lower value would be
> better.
Thanks, this helps: for my version of the LilyPond Notation Reference
a value of 10pt works just fine. Before that I tried 20pt, however, I
got a different but equally bad gap as reported originally. This
makes me wonder whether we are we really turning the right screw...
If I understand you correctly the bad break is the result of
cumulative effects. Maybe this can be avoided by not cumulating them?
Otherwise I can imagine to make the `plus 60pt` part of the skip used
in `\raggedbottom` a user-defined variable.
Werner
