Fitting more systems on the first page of a Lilypond score

Question

I'm working to improve upon an excellent sheet I found of Debussy's Deuxième Arabesque on the freely available Mutopia Project.

In particular, I'm interested in fitting the music on fewer pages but I struggle to have the first page display five systems instead of four with the version I arrived at.

From the reproduction above, I would like the fith system (starting at bar 13) to be at the bottom of the first page. It seems there are a lot of wasted space on the first page and I'm rather confident it will fit perfectly.

I have a hard time playing figuring out how to achieve this. I have displayed the spacing annotations as advised by the documentation but I do not seem to be able to make sense of it.

Constellation

I don't understand the problem. If I compile the file you linked to, with lilypond 2.18.2 (as recommended in the version statement) I get the same result you see here (that is, 6 systems on first page). Please tell exactly which file you are compiling and which version you are using. – Huppah

Yes, you are right, the original file I linked to produces the given result. I have actually modified the original input file to squeeze more bars in the first page, by inserting \break and \noBreak directives. In order to have, for instance three bars on the first line instead of only two in the original file. – Constellation

Then you have to play with the system-system-spacing in the paper block. You can find some examples in Notation Reference Changing spacing – Huppah

Answer 1

If I were typesetting this today, I would try changing the staff size, like this:

#(set-global-staff-size 18)

Merrill

Answer 2

You can add the following to your paper block

\paper {
  min-systems-per-page = #5
  system-system-spacing.padding = #2  %fit staves closer together
  system-system-spacing.stretchability = #15  %how flexible the spacing is
}

This will of course force that all other pages have at least five systems. You can play around with the padding and stretchability values and see what works best. Also, you might want to make the staves smaller than the default 20pt. To do that, you can add the following at the beginning of the file:

#(set-global-staff-size 18)

Bounden