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5.5.1 Automatic behavior

Objects belonging outside the staff include things such as rehearsal marks, text and dynamic markings. LilyPond’s rule for the vertical placement of outside-staff objects is to place them as close to the staff as possible but not so close that they collide with any other object. LilyPond uses the outside-staff-priority property to determine the order in which the objects should be placed, as follows.

First, LilyPond places all the within-staff objects. Then it sorts the outside-staff objects according to their outside-staff-priority. The outside-staff objects are taken one by one, beginning with the object with the lowest outside-staff-priority, and placed so that they do not collide with any objects that have already been placed. That is, if two outside-staff grobs are competing for the same space, the one with the lower outside-staff-priority will be placed closer to the staff. If two objects have the same outside-staff-priority the one encountered first will be placed closer to the staff.

In the following example all the markup texts have the same priority (since it is not explicitly set). Note that ‘Text3’ is automatically positioned close to the staff again, nestling under ‘Text2’.

c''2^"Text1"
c''2^"Text2" |
c''2^"Text3"
c''2^"Text4" |

Staves are also positioned, by default, as closely together as possible (subject to a minimum separation). If notes project a long way towards an adjacent staff they will force the staves further apart only if an overlap of the notation would otherwise occur. The following example demonstrates this ‘nestling’ of the notes on adjacent staves:

<<
  \new Staff {
    \relative { c'4 a, }
  }
  \new Staff {
    \relative { c''''4 a, }
  }
>>