11.4.1 Vertical spacing inside a system

The height of each system is determined automatically. To prevent staves from bumping into each other, some minimum distances are set. By changing these, you can put staves closer together. This reduces the amount of space each system requires, and may result in having more systems per page.

Normally staves are stacked vertically. To make staves maintain a distance, their vertical size is padded. This is done with the property minimum-Y-extent. When applied to a VerticalAxisGroup, it controls the size of a horizontal line, such as a staff or a line of lyrics. minimum-Y-extent takes a pair of numbers, so if you want to make it smaller than its default #'(-4 . 4) then you could set

\override Staff.VerticalAxisGroup #'minimum-Y-extent = #'(-3 . 3)

This sets the vertical size of the current staff to 3 staff spaces on either side of the center staff line. The value (-3 . 3) is interpreted as an interval, where the center line is the 0, so the first number is generally negative. The numbers need not match; for example, the staff can be made larger at the bottom by setting it to (-6 . 4).

See also

Internals: Vertical alignment of staves is handled by the VerticalAlignment object. The context parameters specifying the vertical extent are described in connection with the Axis_group_engraver.

Example files: input/regression//page-spacing.ly, input/regression//alignment-vertical-spacing.ly.