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Adjusting Output

Mup does its best to lay out the music in an aesthetically pleasing way. Often, however, you may want to make adjustments. Perhaps the last part of a piece spilled over onto a third page and you'd like to squeeze it all on two pages, or a page turn falls at an awkward spot. There are several mechanisms available for making adjustments. They have already been discussed individually in various sections of this document, but this section tries to pull things together.

The "newscore," "newpage," "samescorebegin / samescoreend," and "samepagebegin / samepageend" commands can be used to force where breaks do or do not occur. This may be useful for ensuring a section ends at the end of a score or page.

If you want to get a little more or less on each page, it is usually best to start with changing the scale, musicscale, packfact, and/or packexp parameters. You may want to experiment with changing these individually first, to get a feel for how they work, as trying to change all of them at once may lead to interactions that change things more radically than you might expect. Changing musicscale lets you adjust the size of the music without affecting the size of the text in headers and footers. Adjusting the margins is sometimes helpful as well. Other parameters that might be useful in some situations are: maxscores, scorepad, scoresep, staffpad, and staffsep.

The dist, dyndist, and chorddist parameters are useful if you want items to line up vertically. The "align" and "dist" option can be used on rom, bold, ital, boldital, octave, mussym, crescendo and decrescendo statements, to force something where you want it. (The "dist" option can be used on rehearsal marks as well.)

The appearance of lyrics can be adjusted using the lyricsdist, lyricsfont, lyricsfontfamily, lyricssize, and lyricsalign parameters.

Printers often cannot print all the way to the edges of the paper, and sometimes print at some fixed offset from the actual corner of the page. Ghostscript includes an "align.ps" file that you can print that gives you instructions on how to compensate for that, by adding a special "setpagedevice" line to your PostScript files. That special line can be added to Mup output using the postscript afterprolog hook. Since hooks are wrapped in save/restore blocks, and the setpagedevice has to not be in such a block, restore and save lines have to be used to undo the block that Mup adds:

postscript afterprolog "
restore
<<  /.HWMargins [18 18 18 12.5] /Margins [-75 0]  >>  setpagedevice
save"

Replace the numbers with those calculated by following the align.ps instructions. Note that the spacing may need to be exactly as align.ps says.


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