Question

In Lilypond the paper size can be set to A4, A5, Letter and so forth. However I have only a short song, and I want to embed it lateron. Therefore the output from Lilypond must be cropped somehow.

Is there a possibility to let Lilypond itself do this? Some setting to the \paper{} block, perhaps?

Answer 1

From the Lilypond manual:

Extra sizes may be added by editing the definition for paper-alist in the initialization file scm/paper.scm.

You can therefore add your own page sizes to the default ones.

Answer 2

You can use the -dpreview command-line option if you want only the first system, or have ImageMagick convert autocrop it, e.g. via a shell script.