Re: Text spanner shorten-pair

[Carl Sorensen]

 

 

From: Trevor Bača <address@hidden>
Date: Tuesday, February 12, 2019 at 3:09 PM
To: Carl Sorensen <address@hidden>
Cc: Andrew Bernard <address@hidden>, lilypond-user Mailinglist <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: Text spanner shorten-pair

 

On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 11:38 AM Carl Sorensen <address@hidden> wrote:

 

Question: why are there two ways to move around the ends of spanners (padding vs. shortening)? I can't think of a reason that's motivated by music notation.

 

Padding is a minimum amount of blank space between two pieces of ink on the page.  When a pedal bracket is running into empty space, it doesn’t matter what the padding setting is, because there is no ink for it to move away from.  Padding says “don’t just avoid collisions; leave a minimum amount of empty space in addition to avoiding collisions”.  There’s no collision to avoid between a pedal bracket and its associated note column.

 

Which maybe implies that there's a fourth solution:

 

4. Collapse shorten-pair into padding (or vice versa), and preserve one (and only one) such property for *ALL* spanners.

 

It seems to me that if you are to collapse into a single property, it would need to be shorten-pair, because we already have padding and it doesn’t do what you want if there’s no ink to avoid.   But I haven’t looked at all into how the code would need to change with the spanners that don’t currently have shorten-pair.

 

Thanks,

 

Carl