On 09/11/2014 12:44 PM, Martin Tarenskeen wrote:
Hi,
I wanted to remove the indentation at the start of a score, and found
\paper {
indent = 0\cm
}
in the manual. Wondering why to use \cm I soon discovered that it
doesn't matter if I use 0\cm or 0\in or 0\pt or simply 0 without any
unit. It all works. So now I use indent = 0
Hi Martin,
IIRC, if you leave out the unit, the number is interpreted as staff
spaces (i.e., the vertical distance between two lines in a default
staff). Typically, that's not what you expect, so a lot of people got
used to explicitly writing the unit even if it is not required for zero
(anymore?).
But my question is about something else. Reading NR 5.4.3 (Lilypond
2.18) I read: "points, 1/72.27 of an inch"
I have always learnt that a postscript point is defined as exactly 1/72
of an inch. Where does the (small) difference come from?
It's the typographical point, which is defined as, well, 1/72.27 of an
inch. In contrast, the 1/72 inch (also called a DTP point, bigpoint or
bp) was used as a simplification, but does not respect older typographic
standards. And yes, it became famous with PostScript, but that does not
mean that applications using PostScript need to use it as an internal unit.
By the way, these definitions of pt and bp match those from TeX as well
as other common DTP applications, vector graphics software and most word
processors.
Also see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_(typography)
Best,
Alexander
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