Re: names of vertical spacing dimensions

[Trevor Daniels]

David Kastrup wrote Thursday, October 14, 2010 10:05 AM


> "Trevor Daniels" <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > Although this is a good point, the problem is not as
> > stark as this might suggest.  There are many situations
> > when writing LilyPond code when score-wide settings are
> > inappropriate.  This is just another.  \override permits
> > appropriate setting to be made at each point in the score.
>
> You don't know in advance where the pagebreaks are.  And you don't 
> get
> coherent document design if you have to place a bunch of manual
> parameters at every element.

Well IWBN if LilyPond could be clever enough to deal with
all possible layouts perfectly, but a music score is much
more complex that textual layout, and that is hard enough.
There is also a fair amount of personal preference involved
to, so I don't see how manual tweaks can be avoided.  One
possibility is to define a number of different settings
which might give tight spacing, loose spacing, one suitable
for a book of songs, one for a vocal score, etc.  That
might get users off to an acceptable start.

> > Variables or music functions can be used to make this
> > less painful, e.g. \editorialNote could be defined to set
> > the spacing parameters, set \noPageBreak, print the
> > following markup and then revert the spacing parameters.
> >
> > > I don't think that this is a sensible change for 2.14.
> >
> > I do.  If at some time in the future the code is changed
> > to recognise the distinction between a title and a footnote
> > the names of the new spacing parameters would naturally
> > follow the new naming pattern, although I think that change
> > is unlikely to happen.
>
> And it is particularly unlikely to happen, because then we need to
> invent and maintain score-footnote-spacing, 
> system-footnote-spacing,
> markup-footnote-spacing, footnote-footnote-spacing,
> footnote-score-spacing, footnote-markup-spacing,
> footnote-system-spacing, footnote-bottom-spacing, 
> top-footnote-spacing
> and the associated page break penalties.
>
> In short, we are going down a road now where any user-visible
> improvement (for which the necessity is clear) will become 
> increasingly
> painful to do for both developers and users.

OK, I take that point.  This clearly can't happen.  So
we're back to making this easier by defining suitable music
functions for common situations which employ \markup,
like the \editorialNote I suggested earlier to place an
editorial note underneath a system.  That would seem to
deal with that example.  Do you have any others?  Could
they also be handled in a similar way?

Trevor