Re: names of vertical spacing dimensions

[David Kastrup]

Mark Polesky <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>> Since obviously I am alone with this opinion among the
>> developers, I would suggest polling the users on the
>> Lilypond user list whether they think this change a step
>> in the right direction and desirable for 2.14.
>>
>> After all, they will be affected most.
>
> I just want to state (for the record), that I think the
> points David has raised are important ones.  I didn't want
> to start a war here (and I don't think I did), but I wanted
> to expose and confront what I saw as a problem.  And now,
> thanks to David's eloquence, I think we all see the problem.
>
> I think this is a good time to rethink how LilyPond uses the
> \markup command.  Perhaps the code is too casual in this
> respect?  It would be nice instead to have a more semantic
> command vocabulary to replace top-level markups, for
> example:
>
> \alternateVerse
> \footnote
> \dialogue
> \stageDirections

I am not sure new top-level primitives are the solution.  If we take a
look at TeX/LaTeX, the engine TeX does not bother with niceties like
that apart from being able to deal with penalties, and removing
"discardable items" like penalties and vertical space after a page
break.  If you want to have anything along the line of consistent
document layouts, you need to program them on your own, built upon the
primitives.  Which is what LaTeX does.  And there exist extension
packages where you can declare new sectional material and so on.

I don't think that there is anything wrong with implementing things like
titles by using markups.  The problem is that at some point of time,
markups were promoted to top-level document elements (giving them
spacing and distances to other top-level document elements), and the
top-level document elements are dependent on the document design.

> ...or whatever.  Then, \markup could be used really as an
> un-semantic backup command for cases when nothing else fits.

That's my gut feeling as well.  But it also would seem to make sense if
it can be used as an un-semantic building block inside of semantic
commands.  So how do we get the semantics into/around markup or other
document layout elements?  And how does Lilypond get them out again?

> On the topic of this actual thread, I have a patch all ready
> to go -- http://codereview.appspot.com/2505041/ -- but I'm
> in no real rush, and I'm happy to wait for everyone to
> converge on a realistic proposal for a long-term solution,
> even if it's totally different.  So let me know what you
> guys think I should do with my patch.

Well, it did wake me up.  That may have been a good effect of it,
depending on one's views.

-- 
David Kastrup