Vertical space advice

[Rob Leduc]

Hi all,

I'm aware there are no hard and fast rules and typesetting is a profession and art, so no universal solutions exist.  I am, however, finding difficulty in managing the vertical space in Latex with Gregorio Tex in a document with a number of chant scores and am looking for a brief description of how others handle vertical space between chants or between chant and paragraph text, or pointers to a document outlining best practices in managing vertical space in general.

What latex structures or commands do you use to lay out the page? Or do you know of a good tutorial elsewhere?

For example, I'm reproducing a little of the psalter from the Nocturnale Romanum (e.g. https://gregobase.selapa.net/source.php?id=23&images=1&index=4).  As with all such books, you get a few antiphons in a row followed by some text, followed by several antiphons, a new section heading, wash, rinse, repeat.

I'm not at all clear on how Gregorio Tex manages the vertical space around a chant, or what LaTeX thinks the chant score "is" as an object, in terms of before and after spacing. Is it a letter, a paragraph, a box, a graphics object of some kind?  I'm getting a lot of bad page breaks with the default style settings.  I'm trying to keep a light hand in forcing changes as I suppose the general conventions of typesetting know better than I do. 

That's pretty vague, I'm sure.  Thanks for whatever you can share.

Rob

[Fr. Samuel Springuel]

> On 27 Jan, 2021, at 12:34 PM, Rob Leduc <rled...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm not at all clear on how Gregorio Tex manages the vertical space around a chant, or what LaTeX thinks the chant score "is" as an object, in terms of before and after spacing. Is it a letter, a paragraph, a box, a graphics object of some kind?

The score is a paragraph. As such, `\parskip` is controls the spacing between a chant and the text before it. Further, we use a chant specific `\parskip` which you can change with `\grechangedim{parskip}{<desired value>}{scalable}` (change “scalable” to “fixed” if you use multiple sizes of scores and don’t want the spacing to change when the size of the score changes).

There’s no way to control the space between a chant and the text after it directly, though perhaps there should be. If you change the document’s `\parskip`, that will add space after the chant, but it will also add space between non-chant paragraphs.

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Fr. Samuel, OSB
(R. Padraic Springuel)
St. Anselm’s Abbey
4501 South Dakota Ave, NE
Washington, DC, 20017
202-269-2300
(c) 202-853-7036

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