I'm getting close to releasing a version of PMX that enables arbitrary blank gaps at the beginning or middle of any staff, relying on TeXniques designed by Olivier Vogel and expanded by Bob Tennet. In modifying PMX it hasn't been at all easy to account for all the possibilities involving movement breaks, page breaks, bar numbering, etc., but now I have most of the horizontal spacing issues worked out. However, there are still some problems with vertical spacing, illustrated with the attached plain MusiXTeX file eqprob.tex. It uses Olivier's basic method for shortening a line by putting it into a \hbox. The file also uses the long-standing PMX method "Av" to try to get equal vertical spacing. Av works by including very long, equal-length vertical struts in all lines. This in effect gives all systems equal heights which add up to more space than available on one page, so when forced into the actual vertical space in the page, they all end of with the same amount of blank vertical space being clipped off, leaving equal vertical space between the bottom line of one system and the top line of the next. If you compile the example, you'll see that the method breaks down for the shortened system in line 4, probably related to the fact that the \hbox is handled differently during the vertical squeezing/trimming process.
The other file uneqprob.tex has all of the struts removed, and represents
what PMX would give without Av. Now the space above line 4 comes out too
small.
I'd be very grateful if someone could figure out a general way to get the
\hbox'ed line handled the same way as the other lines in both cases,
restoring the equal vertical spacing.
I did find that I could manually reduce or expand the size of the unequal
gap using \spread{...} with a positive or negative argument. This command,
defined in pmx.tex, adds a negative \vskip right before the next \contpiece.
But it takes trial and error to find the right value of the argument, so
it's not at all the ideal solution.
--Don
eqprob.tex
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uneqprob.tex
Description: Binary data
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