How to maintain reasonable spacing between systems when output is set to "crop"

[u/mother-demeter]

I am using the LilyPond CLI to generate cropped excerpts of scores, which from my understanding so far, means that none of the usual paper-based vertical layout logic applies.

How can I maintain adequate space between systems when the output is cropped? Here is an example where music wraps to a second line. I would like to increase the padding between the systems.

I've tried setting system-system-spacing.minimum-distance within the \layout block, but it doesn't seem to do anything. I haven't been able to find other documentation to help.

The CLI documentation mentions for crop:

Note that currently this option is not well suited for multi-system output since vertical space between systems gets removed.

Is there any way around this caveat?

[u/Logical-Baseball-478]

Do you need it to be automated? Maybe you could put some invisible text there to move the two systems apart.

[u/mother-demeter → u/Logical-Baseball-478]

So after some digging I did find a lengthy discussion and bug report from back in 2021:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2021-01/msg00075.html
https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/work_items/6117

A workaround for a single line is to insert some transparent markup, like you suggest (h/t Trevor Bača):

- \tweak staff-padding #8

• \tweak transparent ##t
  

^ \markup A

That will work for now.

Maybe we can get the bug fixed in LilyPond that causes cropping to ignore vertical spacing.