On Tue 12 Jan 2021 at 09:30:05 (-0500), Trevor Bača wrote: > Hi Werner, Aaron and David (again), > > I’m the OP, and I realize that I failed to provide the context of my > workflow. I’ll try to do that now, to help make better use of all your time! > > My workflow has to do with maintaining the docs for Abjad. (Abjad is a > Python package for generating LilyPond files programmatically.) I’ve used > Lily for years to produce (PDF output of) my own scores, which never > involved cropping. More recently, documentation of examples on the Abjad > website has necessitated cropping. Here’s an example of a minuet-generating > game from the 18th-century, sometimes attributed to Mozart: > > https://abjad.github.io/literature_examples/mozart.html > > That page contains three examples created by LilyPond: > > 1. > > a two-measure (single-system) toy example (near the top of the page); > 2. > > a 17-measure minuet (near the bottom of the page); and > 3. > > the same 17-measure minuet with a few more overrides (at the very bottom > of the page). > > You can right away the quality of Lily’s SVG output for these examples is > fantastic. Lily’s SVG images have added a new level of professionalism to > my docs. > > But you can also see the multisystem examples (#2 and #3) look kinda crazy > because of the “system-packing” trait carried by the current implementation > of -dcrop: > > [image: screen-shot-example-2.png] > > There’s just not enough whitespace between systems. And it would be so > lovely to bring the whole thing up to the beautiful standards that are now > possible with the sharpness of the SVG output. (And the bass clef hasn’t > been attached yet in that example! ;) > > In the upcoming release of Abjad’s docs, my workaround has been to add > transparent markup “struts” above notes in the top system, sprinkling > something like … > > - \tweak staff-padding #10 > - \tweak transparent ##t > ^ \markup A > > … at strategic places.
A workaround that wouldn't involve changing the source code for every multiline score would be to remove "-dcrop" from the flags list in sphinx.py, and instead use Python's subprocess module to crop the image with Niols's method (inkscape), shown half-a-dozen posts upthread. The result would look like cartoon D in my earlier post (with tagline=##f.) (My own workflow is PDF-based, and pdfcrop is the utility I use to achieve the same result as what you want.) > Surprisingly, the presence of the (transparent) > markup tricks -dcrop into preserving the whitespace between systems, giving > totally beautiful results. Here’s an example (local to my machine and not > yet visible at the link above): > > [image: local-with-whitespace.png] > > Ok, apologies for going on at length here, but hopefully now my workflow is > a little more clear. > > I’m not here to condemn the implementation of a feature (or anyone’s > work!). I was just surprised that -dcrop “packs” systems together, because > that’s not a behavior of cropping I'm used to in other pieces of software. > And the “system packing” behavior of the current implementation of -dcrop > means that in the Abjad docs I have really wonderful single-system examples > … but messier multisystem examples. > > In the end, I guess all of this reduces to the following: the current > (“system-packing”) trait of -dcrop means that my multisystem examples are > less than ideal. That’s all ;) > > Knowing all this, would it be possible to allow for a non-system-packing > version of -dcrop? > > Only because I have hard time imagining a use case for the current > system-packing behavior, I suppose it’s possible that the behavior of > -dcrop should be changed globally to preserve intersystem spacing. (“Why > would we want to remove an element of page layout that users specify by > hand, with system-system-spacing and the like?”) But maybe there are users > with creative uses of the current system-packing behavior? In which case > I’d be delighted with perhaps an additional flag (-dcrop-preserve?) to > allow page-layout-preserving cases, too. > > Either outcome opens up a new world of possibilities in which users can use > SVG output to demo the page layout of music, cropped to fit nicely into doc > websites and the like. Cheers, David.
