Ledger lines (Essay on automated music engraving)

#### Ledger lines

Ledger lines present a typographical challenge: they make it more difficult to space musical symbols close together and they must be clear enough to identify the pitch at a glance. In the example below, we see that ledger lines should be thicker than normal staff lines and that an expert engraver will shorten a ledger line to allow closer spacing with accidentals. We have included this feature in LilyPond’s engraving.

#### Essay on automated music engraving v2.26.0 (stable-branch).

- 1 Music engraving
  - 1.1 The LilyPond story
  - 1.2 Engraving details
    - Music fonts
    - Optical spacing
    - Ledger lines
    - Optical sizing
    - Why work so hard?
  - 1.3 Automated engraving
    - Beauty contests
    - Improvement by benchmarking
    - Getting things right
  - 1.4 Building software
    - Music representation
    - What symbols to engrave?
    - Flexible architecture
  - 1.5 Putting LilyPond to work
  - 1.6 Engraved examples (BWV 861)
- 2 Literature list
  - 2.1 Short literature list
  - 2.2 Long literature list
- Appendix A GNU Free Documentation License
- Appendix B Index