Music layout - GNU LilyPond
Description: GNU LilyPond

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### 10.5 Music layout

This section deals with the manner in which the music is printed within the boundaries defined by the `\paper` block.

The global paper layout is determined by three factors: the page layout, the line breaks, and the spacing. These all influence each other. The choice of spacing determines how densely each system of music is set. This influences where line breaks are chosen, and thus ultimately, how many pages a piece of music takes.

Globally spoken, this procedure happens in three steps: first, flexible distances (“springs”) are chosen, based on durations. All possible line breaking combinations are tried, and the one with the best results – a layout that has uniform density and requires as little stretching or cramping as possible – is chosen.

After spacing and linebreaking, the systems are distributed across pages, taking into account the size of the page, and the size of the titles.

This page is for LilyPond-2.8.8 (stable-branch).

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