Re: cruft after introduction to vocal piece - solved

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Ed,

> The man page refers to skips as "invisible rests".  Is that not the  
> case?

It's probably just a semantic argument, but in my opinion, NO.
[The docs should probably be changed to eliminate confusion.]

A rest is a graphic object which appears on a staff to indicate the  
voice in question should remain silent while a certain amount of time  
passes.
A skip is not a graphic object, it doesn't appear on a staff (or  
anywhere, for that matter), and it provides no direction to any voice  
about anything -- it is simply a technical tool to control Lilypond.

In other words, a rest has a score-based (musical) meaning, and a  
skip doesn't.

Furthermore, as you have seen, filling empty measures with "s1"  
versus "R1" will result in very different scores when you compile.

Best wishes,
Kieren.