Re: Quoted text (was Re: When is "-" required in articulations?)

[Trevor Daniels]

Valentin Villenave wrote Saturday, May 24, 2008 8:44 AM
> 2008/5/24 Graham Percival <address@hidden>:
> > This looks right to me, and since nobody has come up with any
> > better names, let's go with bracketed/quoted/bare.
>
> bracketed might be confusing with [bracketed text]]

or (bracketed text), I guess.  But as these will either
give errors or leave the brackets in the printed output
the user will soon become enlightened.  But maybe that
is the wrong attitude ...

> I don't speak English, but I assume there's no such thing as "braced 
> text"?

You could use the phrase, but it conjures up an image
of text somehow supported physically with a buttress
or similar, perhaps the better to withstand a strong wind ;)

Actually though, as a specially defined LilyPond term this
might just be acceptable.  Like "quoted text" it is a
precise description.  The more I think about it the
better I like it.  When a user reads "braced text" he
will surely either look it up immediately, realising
can't mean "buttressed text" so must be a special term,
or think, "Ah yes, I remember that term, it means ...".

> ... or we could take advantage of the fact that in Lily everything
> that is enclosed in { } is called a _block_; hence my "text blocks"
> thing in the docs.
>
> I'd go for "text block", "quoted text" and "bare text".

The problem with "text block" is that the grammatical
object is "block" modified with "text", whereas the
object in all the original three is the same - "text".
If the object is different there will be difficulties
in using the terms together or in similar sentences.
For example, instead of "braced and quoted text ..."
you'd have to say something like "text in a text block
or quoted text ...", which is ugly, and therefore
harder to read and comprehend.  The corresponding
term would be "blocked text", but this seems less
intuitive than "bracketed text" or even "braced text".

> (besides, a text block can contain quoted text and/or bare text,
> whereas the opposite is not true)

Yes, there is a heirarchy of text: \markup can contain
braced text which can contain quoted text which
(always) contains bare text.

> Cheers,
> Valentin