"Matthias Holländer" wrote
>
> Dear Don,
>
> I really didn't mean to offend you or get you upset, if that was the case I
> firmly beg your pardon.
Absolutely no offense taken. It ALWAYS makes me happy to see new evidence of
anyone using PMX.
> I only wanted to make clear what I mean. And you're
> right, I got the code confused a bit there (I will point out how and correct
> it in
> a moment). To avoid further confusion I want to furthermore take into
> account only the example with two staves per system ("Der Tag, mein Gott,
> ist nun vergangen"), since the other one was focused on the "two pieces of
> music in one document" problem, which is solved.
>
> In the two staves per system example, which I wanted to use to
> demonstrate the vertical spacing thing, because the change I aimed for is
> more impressive (compare the pdf-files in the attachment), there is three
> systems (six staves) on the page.
Vertical spacing in PMX and in MusixTeX is really a bitch. I've spent countless
hours trying to get it right both in PMX, and if PMX messes up, then by using
inline TeX in my own typesets. I keep hoping the problems will go away, but
new ones keep popping up.
I think our wires got crossed. You seem to be referring to your 2nd posting on
4/29, which did have an example with 3 systems, and which seems to correspond
to one of the two pdf's you just posted . However, I had not analyzed that one
at all, but rather was only looking at and commenting on the 3rd example file
in your 3rd posting on 4/29, which had 5 systems and 3 \spread's. There's a
fundamental, very important distinction between these two cases: if there are
too few staves in total on a page, PMX by default will group them near the top
and leave a wider space at the bottom, but otherwise spread them out more or
less equally vertically. Your two recent PDFs were both in in the first
category, but my earlier comments were entirely about files in the 2nd
category. There are some major subtleties I won't go into detail here about
what counts as "too few staves" in the first category, and also why in the
second category they would not in general be exactly equally spaced by default.
But suffice it to say the two categories pose radically different challenges in
setting vertical spacing, and PMX handles them very differently.
Historically I've spent much more effort making PMX deal with the 2nd category,
simply because most scores use full pages. That may explain in part why, as
I've just realized, when in the first category, AI seems to have no effect at
all, and Ae doesn't do what you'd expect. As you probably noticed, when you
used Ae in the code you posted for the 3-system example, curiously it did
spread the systems a bit but not equally over the whole page height. However,
I'd regard Ae's failure to spread the systems over the full height in the first
category as a non-issue, because if one really wanted to spread a small number
of systems roughly equally over the full height, he could make it happen with
Av, together with Ae if you wanted them exactly equally spaced, and with AI to
further adjust the spacing between staves in each system. And if you had a
small number of systems grouped toward the top of the page and simply wanted to
tweak the inter-system space, \spread would still work.
On the other hand, at some point I may look into why AI doesn't seem to work to
alter inter-staff spacing in the first category. But please don't hold your
breath.
I am curious how you managed to adjust the inter-system spacing in the two
first-category examples you most recently posted. DerTag_wide seems to
correspond with the 3-system code you posted on 4/29, but as I tried to explain
above, that behavior of Ae is not as expected and not something I ever planned
for. However, when I remove Ae, the spacing comes out narrower than in
DerTag_close, so the only way I can think of offhand to get your spacing there
is to remove Ae and use \spread. Could you post the PMX files?
>...
> "Don Simons" wrote:
> >I assume you're aware that in your sample you did NOT apply the
> >inter-system reduction to all the inter-system spaces, but only to 3 of the
> >4.
>> Therefore the 3rd space got larger.
> May it be that this refers to the example of how to print 2 pieces of music
> in a
> single document, given by Andre van Ryckeghem?
No. See my previous comment about which of your samples I was referring to.
--Don
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