On Sun 14 Jun 2026 at 09:30:11 (-0700), Eric Benson wrote:
> Is there any way to get LilyPond to report some actual data about how many
> pages it has produced and how many staves are on each page? I am using
> explicit page breaks in my scores and would like to know if LilyPond has
> inserted any automatically generated page breaks. It would help me choose
> my own page breaks if I had some better feedback about what it has done.
> The message
>
> Fitting music on 1 or 2 pages...
>
> tells me something, and by my observation almost always means 2 pages, but
> it would be nice to get the true number at the very end. The other related
> bit is knowing about "widows and orphans", i.e. stray single staves pushed
> onto a different page from the rest of the score. When I discover these I
> try to rearrange my explicit page breaks to reduce the incidence.
>
> My project has grown to the point where simple visual inspection is no
> longer effective. I need some kind of automation to show me when a single
> page score has spilled onto a second page. I can use a PDF library with a
> Python script as a post-process, but that's a big hammer to wield and I
> can't get much more than just an accurate page count with it.
I think my scripts are fairly typical in using:
local Thepagecount="$(pdfinfo "$1" | awk '{if ( /^Pages:/ ) printf ( "%s", $2
)}')"
I don't know whether the rest of pdfinfo's output satisfies
your need for more than the page count.
Cheers,
David.
