On 6/30/2026 2:24 PM, Eric Benson wrote:
Anyway, in the process of building these books I encountered a strange
problem. There is a particular song that causes the engraving to
either go past the right edge and bottom edge of the page, or shrink
both margins so that it uses a smaller part of the page. This
condition persists in the book until it engraves a different
particular song that sets it back to the correct size. I use a
somewhat complicated system of include files to enable these songs to
be typeset in different keys.
...
I put some files in GitHub to show the problem. In this folder:
https://github.com/neonscribe/lilypond-lead-sheets/tree/main/TeX
there are four files, AV.ly, AV.pdf, AVX.ly and AVX.pdf. The AV files
show the layout spilling past the edges, while the AVX files show the
layout shrinking.
Eric,
In short, the problem is due to an include file for a different song
doing #(set-global-staff-size 18) when that is not what is appropriate
to the problem song. In your structure, if you need to
set-global-staff-size for one song, maybe you need to do that for every
song.
Here is how I made an MWE for your AV.ly example, where the first song
(Chega de Saudade) gets clipped on the right margin, as you showed. I
reduced AV.ly to the following, *so only the first song was produced but
with the problem still present*:
\version "2.26.0"
inBook = ##t
thisPart = ##f
\include "../Wrappers/Chega de Saudade - Ly - C Alto Voice.ly"
songaaaaaa = \bookpart { \thisPart }
%\include "../Wrappers/Darn That Dream - Ly - C Alto Voice.ly"
%songaaaaab = \bookpart { \thisPart }
*\include "../Wrappers/Destination Moon - Ly - Eb Alto Voice.ly"*
%songaaaaac = \bookpart { \thisPart }
\book {
\paper {
tocItemMarkup = \tocItemWithDotsMarkup
tocTitleMarkup = \markup \huge \larger \larger \larger \column {
\fill-line { \null "AVB" \null }
\hspace #1
}
}
\markuplist \table-of-contents
\bookpart { \songaaaaaa }
%\bookpart { \songaaaaab }
%\include "../Include/blank-staff.ily"
%\bookpart { \songaaaaac }
}
You can see that the other two songs are not being produced in the pdf,
but nevertheless the problem (at this level) is the following include
statement:
\include "../Wrappers/Destination Moon - Ly - Eb Alto Voice.ly"
That Wrappers file then does another include of the Core file:
\include "../Core/Destination Moon - Ly Core - Bb.ly"
That Core file, where you declare variables defining the particulars of
that song, also begins with the statement (that has global effect)
#(set-global-staff-size 18)
*Commenting out that statement restores the first song to its
appropriate margins.*
That's how you can make an MWE even for your huge project.
Lessons learned (for me and probably others):
1) On huge github repos, where the list of files exceeds what the gui
can handle, the "Go to file" dialogue may hang forever unless you *use a
private browser window* (learned that from AI just now). That finally
allowed me to start downloading files until your AV.ly would compile.
2) In all, that required 39 downloads, mostly of short files. It would
have helped in this case if you had made a zip of all those files to
package your MWE.
3) Frescobaldi 3.1.1 doesn't seem to have an explicit way to comment out
selected lines of code, but it does have a useful tool that helped me:
*Edit > Cut/Copy (advanced) > Cut and Assign (Ctrl-Shift-X).* This
moves the selected lines into a variable, replacing them by an
invocation of that variable. You can then comment out the single line
invocation to disable all that code, or re-enable it by uncommenting
that one line.
As they say, "Hope that helps!"
Jeff
