Re: Inline score inside markup - bugs in music alignment

[David Kastrup]

"Jiri Zurek (Prague)" <address@hidden> writes:

> Dear David,
> thank you for your valuable opinion but, in my case, the text needs to
> be justified and the music inside markuplines should wrap along the
> lines of the surrounding text. I am using it for a musicological
> apparatus accompanying the piece and if the systems of the piece and
> other texts of the book are well justified, it makes no sense to
> interrupt the flow with ragged-right apparatus. Imagine, this book
> will have several hundred pages and hundreds of small musical pieces -
> liturgical antiphones, each accompanied by the apparatus. It must be
> justified.
>
> I still hope there is a solution for my problem,

I recommend magic.  At some point of time reality has to intrude.  If
there is no way to find an arrangement meeting all requirements by hand,
the computer can do no better.

> Now, that thanks to Neil we have the score block inside markuplines
> breakable, the function should be simply disabled. The music would
> start at the same line with the text and when the end of line is
> reached, it would simply break to another one. Any help appreciated.

I happen to be the author of a LaTeX style file that typesets footnotes,
and tries merging several footnotes into one line automagically "where
appropriate" (TM).  Getting to the point where thousands of pages would
be cranked out with footnotes of wildly varying size (single words to
dozens of pages) _one_ algorithm without pages that would look better
when done manually was quite some hard work.

It involved a lot of fine-tuning and a solid bunch of fuzzy logic.
Applying some of this to the context of scores, you would not want to
have a _multi-line_ excerpt broken across lines.  And not have one
five-line excerpt end at the start of a line, have a few words of text,
and the next excerpt start in the same line.  And don't break a score
excerpt if you don't save some space.  And so forth and so on.

Justifying text deals with other stretchabilities as justifying music.
They don't match very well.

There is no simple solution for your problem that would yield
satisfactory output.

-- 
David Kastrup