Date in the footer and Headers/Footers/Titles

[Chip]

There has been recent discussion on -user regarding getting the date in the
footer. One of the problems in finding the solution has been the docs
themselves. I have a suggestion that may, in the long run, help 
straighten a few
things out. But first I want to suggest this: move the section '3.2 
Titles and
headers' found in the NOTATION Reference to the LM. Why? Because the NR 
should
be about Notation, and headers/footers/titles are not notation.

As a nooby if I'm looking for info on adding a date to the footer I start by
searching for Footer in the index of the LM, but it's not there. Then I 
look in
the NR, and it sends me to 3.2.2 Custom Titles. And now I'm thinking 
'why am I
reading about titles when I should be reading about the footer?' I see 
the bit
about evenFooterMarkup and oddFooterMarkup and no example of what to do with
them, just a very brief description.

After a search of the archive and no relevant answer I send a question 
to the
-users list asking about putting the date in the footer and get sent to LSR
'Titles Adding the current date to a score'. This doesn't help as it's about
titles and has nothing to do with the footer. I was also given a link to 
a work
in the LilyMusic web site in which I found the code that with minor altering
does exactly what I was asking for. This link didn't come from one of the
lilypond 'developers', it came from a very helpful user. Seems all I get 
from,
well, one, developer, is grief and no help.

You see the root of the problem? Headers are, without getting to 
nitpicky with
definitions for printed matter(books), at the top of a page, generally in
larger, or bolder, or different font from the body of the page. Titles are
generally a bit smaller than headers but larger, or in some visual manner,
different from the body text. Footers are at the bottom of the page. All 
three
are separate entities. And should be treated as such.

With all that said here is the code for the footer that solves the problem -
---------------
tagline = \markup {
Engraved on
\simple #(strftime "%b %d, %Y" (localtime (current-time)))
with \with-url #"http://lilypond.org/web/";
{ LilyPond \simple #(lilypond-version) (http://lilypond.org/) }
}
--------------
This code should be in the section that describes the footer, where ever 
it may
be (currently NR 3.2.2). And maybe also in the LSR 'Titles Adding the 
current
date to a score'. Though that whole section should be in the LM '2.5 
Final touches'.

There have been complaints about noobys not doing anything to help so I 
have put
in my first 2 cents worth in the hope that it will save someone else the 
grief I
had to deal with this week.

Regards,
Chip Wiegand