Chord name/Volta collision

[Walter Hofmeister]

Hello all,  
    I have typeset a piece that involves a melody with chord names above. I
have had problems with getting things to look good. At first the chord names
would appear above the alternative ending brackets. I have managed to get
the chord names lowered so that they are now under the brackets but now the
number belonging to the alternative bracket clashes with the chord name. I
have tried setting "direction", "side-relative-direction", and
"direction-source". But have not been able to produce the correct results.

When setting "direction-source" the line of code I used was:
\property Staff.VoltaBracket \set #'direction-source = #'ChordName
This produced the error:
Type check for `direction-source' failed; value `ChordName' must be of type
`grob (GRaphical OBject)' when compiling.
Can someone tell me what was wrong with the line of code?
    I am getting increasingly frustrated with my attempts at tweaking output
of Lilypond. I can see that there is huge flexibility and power here but
producing the results one desires is VERY difficult. The documentation lists
huge amounts of information as to what graphic objects are related and what
properties they accept, but most of these properties are unset and there are
no examples of the line of code that applies to that property. I realize
that there is much repetition in the kind of arguments that setting these
properties accept, but while looking through the documentation I see many
other descriptions that have been repeated many times for different objects.
    The Tips and Tricks document has been quoted as having set many
properties, but in order to see how it was done you have to load the
specific .ly file into an editor and examine the file. I also have not found
references to things that one might commonly set like: if you would like to
change the space between the clef and the key signature, do this.
    To set the space between the staff and chord names, I had to send a note
to this list which produced no solution (hey I know this can happen and am
not blaming anybody), and search the archives which also did not produce a
solution. I arrived at the solution indirectly by searching the archives for
a solution on how to change the height of the Volta Brackets. This all took
considerable time for something that I would have thought should be an easy
thing to set.
    I have spent many hours reading through documentation for Lilypond that
gives me the feeling of going around in circles. Sorry for the rant but from
my point of view these are issues that will need to be dealt with in order
for Lilypond's userbase to increase. I suspect that there are many people
who have installed Lilypond and have given up on it because of these issues.
I for one will try to improve my command of Lilypond, but these frustrations
are real for me.

Walter Hofmeister