Enhancement to #771

[Francisco Vila]

>
Hello. See #771 http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=771

Graham said:

> I'm not certain that I understand the "negative padding to emulate a vertical
> skyline" issue; if you want this in the tracker, please prepare a tiny 
> example for
> the bug-lilypond list, or else just add a new item yourself.

The golden ribbon to this would be:
Comment #3 by Neil describes the remaining issue clearly. His image
shows what ideally we would want. It is achieved by manually applying
a negative offset to the whole column of instrument names so that it
gets closer to the system, while the items remain centered.  This
allows us to use an otherwise empty space, namely the space between
the longest name and the system, see my image on comment #2 for what
we currently get.  A fully automatic process would draw a pair of
skylines, one for the systems with their starter braces, another for
the column of names, and could automatically compute this override.

http://paconet.org/negative-instrumentname-padding.png

\markup { what we currently get: }
\score {
        <<
          \new PianoStaff <<
            \new Staff \with { instrumentName = "short" } { s }
            \new Staff \with { instrumentName = "short" } { s }
          >>
          \new Staff \with { instrumentName = "looooong" } { s }
        >>
}

\markup { what a smart engraver ideally would do, automatically: }
\score {
        <<
          \new PianoStaff <<
            \new Staff \with { instrumentName = "short" } { s }
            \new Staff \with { instrumentName = "short" } { s }
          >>
          \new Staff \with { instrumentName = "looooong" } { s }
        >>

        \layout {
                  \context {
                    \Staff
                    % or \Score, if there are also instrument names attached to
grouping contexts
                    % (e.g. PianoStaff)
                    \override InstrumentName #'padding = #-1.0
                }
        }
}



-- 
Francisco Vila. Badajoz (Spain)
www.paconet.org , www.csmbadajoz.com