Control: wontfix On Sat, 20 Feb 2016 00:23:22 -0600 "Karl O. Pinc" <[email protected]> wrote: > It'd be nice if lilypond had a better way of specifying paper > size. It defaults to a4 and figuring out how to set it to > letter is non-trivial for the inexperienced. > > For the record, one approach is: > > lilypond -dpaper-size='"letter"' foo.ly > > It'd be especially nice if lilypond used /etc/papersize. > > It'd be nice if lilypond had a PAPERSIZE env var, and/or > a shortcut --paper-size command line option. > > It'd be nice if any of the above was mentioned in the man page. > > A ~/.lilypond/config file (or some such) containing default command > line option values wouldn't hurt either. > > Thanks for listening.
Hello Karl, Thank you for your comment. Actually, as a somewhat frequent LilyPond user myself, I don't even know about the -dpaper-size command-line option, and I don't think it is documented in LilyPond documentation either. Rather, the officially documented method is outlined in http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/paper-size-and-automatic-scaling, i.e., by setting the paper size in the .ly file itself: \paper { #(set-paper-size "letter") } I use Frescobaldi (a great GUI editor for LilyPond) myself, and its Score Wizard feature automatically generates needed skeleton LilyPond code for you, together with the set-paper-size command above. I highly recommend that you do the same instead, i.e. using Frescobaldi (sudo apt-get install frescobaldi) and setting the paper size inside your .ly file. Changing the paper size on-the-fly using -dpaper-size is unreliable IMHO. You yourself may remember to add the "-dpaper-size letter" option, but others who receive the same .ly file with are not obliged to do so, and would get unexpected results such as extra page, ugly line-breaks, etc. due to unexpectedly different page width and page height. The fact that LilyPond does not read /etc/papersize is by design, and I think it is a good thing. Ignoring user environment variations like /etc/papersize helps ensure that the same .ly would produce the exactly same result everywhere. Hope you'll agree. :-) Cheers, Anthony
