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Notes that occupy a complete measure are given some extra spacing from the preceding bar line. This can be adjusted using the full-measure-extra-space property of NonMusicalPaperColumn. The default is 1. A value of zero removes the extra space allowed; -1 removes the space completely. Positive numbers greater than 1 increase the spacing.

For joining syllables, LilyPond doesn't use the hyphen of the text font but instead draws a simple line with variable length. Its standard vertical position doesn't always fit the proportions of the text font. When using a font with a large x-height, it may be too low.

You can adjust the vertical positioning of the hyphens manually. To get a good result you may want to insert a “real” hyphen for comparision (the l-e in the snippet).

If you want to affect the behaviour (color, rotation, translate etc.) of an item at a linebreak only on the left or the right side (like BarLines, KeySignatures, Clefs, TimeSignatures etc.) use the definitions and functions as defined here. Several other definitions are possible by using this examples.

Aiken head white notes get harder to read at smaller staff sizes, especially with ledger lines. Losing interior white space makes them appear as quarter notes.

\airytone takes three arguments: a circle radius, a degree of fullness (from 0 - 1) and a line thickness. Generally, in the modern rep, an open circle (0) corresponds to all air and a full circle (1) corresponds to a full, robust tone.

The horizontal alignment of instrument names is tweaked by changing the Staff.InstrumentName.self-alignment-X property. The \layout variables indent and short-indent define the space in which the instrument names are aligned before the first and the following systems, respectively.

Here is an advanced macro to produce automatically centered instrument names: use \instrument for a single line instrument name, and \instruments for a multi line instrument name.

Bar numbers by default are right-aligned to their parent object. This is usually the left edge of a line or, if numbers are printed within a line, the left hand side of a bar line. The numbers may also be positioned directly over the bar line or left-aligned to the bar line.

One can use \markup \fill-line { \column { "line1" "line2" ... } \column { "line1" "line2" ... } } to create text markup in multiple columns (for example, writing out the text of various stanzas after the score). However, the column widths are calculated from the contents, so columns from different markups are not aligned with each other.

However, one can write a \columns macro, which makes each column exactly 1/n of the line-width, thus aligning even columns of different markups. The syntax stays the same, only that one has to use \columns instead of \fill-line:

\markup \columns {
  \column{"default column 1" "line 2"}
  \column{"column 2, wider than the rest" "line 2"}
  \column{"c 3" "line 2"}
}

If specified, text marks may be aligned with notation objects other than bar lines. These objects include ambitus, breathing-sign, clef, custos, staff-bar, left-edge, key-cancellation, key-signature, and time-signature.

In such cases, text marks will be horizontally centered above the object. However this can be changed, as demonstrated on the second line of this example (in a score with multiple staves, this setting should be done for all the staves).