A quest through the docs

[Don Blaheta]

I wanted to find out how to, for some snippets in a book, make the last
line of the snippet not expand to its maximum width.

I went to the table of contents briefly and found nothing, so I turned
to the index.  Nothing under "last", but I tried to do a browser find on
"last", which turned up "ragged-last-bottom".  The name seemed promising
but it wasn't what I wanted, so I went back to the index.
"ragged-right" was the next thing, and although I didn't want every line
ragged, I thought maybe I could insert some manual overrides, so I
clicked on it.

This took me to 10.5.7 "Line length", which lists not only ragged-right
but also raggedlast, which *is* what I wanted, although it wasn't listed
in the index.

But then, I wasn't sure how to use it.  Going "up" to 10.5 "Music
layout" didn't tell me much, so I went all the way over to the Program
reference to see if I could figure out what grob or whatever it would be
attached to.  I rooted around a bit as I always have to in the program
reference, didn't find it at first, noticed the "index" option but it
wasn't in there either.  So then I went through each of the different
"properties" lists in the back end looking for anything "ragged", but I
couldn't find anything.

So I went back to 10.5.7 and thought, hm, maybe raggedlast just a plain
old variable (or whatever it's called) like indent, and not attached to
any of the objects.  Sure enough, that's exactly how it works.

Anyway, so I have a few specific suggestions arising from this latest
documentation quest:

* "raggedlast" should be "ragged-last-right" for consistency with the
  others...

* ...and it should be in the index in any case.

* The top two levels of the Program reference should be on a single
  page, or else the summaries on the top page should include the words
  "grob", "context", "engraver", etc in the appropriate places, because
  I can never remember which top-level section each thing goes in.

* The program reference index should have all the items currently in the
  third level of the program reference: all the individual contexts,
  properties, grobs, engravers, etc, etc.

* 10.5.7 should have an example layout block like the following:
  \layout {
    indent = #0
    line-width = #150
    raggedlast = ##t
  }
  and explain that it removes the first line's indent, sets the width to
  150 times the width of a staff space (right?), and turns on raggedlast
  mode.

-- 
-=-Don address@hidden<http://www.blahedo.org/>-=-
"Do you know what I love about corporate CEOs? Their commitment to
honesty.  I like to think we owe the free market for that. In a more
regulated system, they might lie sometimes."            --Bob Romashko