Re: Odd vertical spacing of lyrics

[James Bailey]

On Jan 19, 2011, at 1:27 AM, Keith OHara wrote:
> That was quite topical, for an 'off-topic' rant.
> You have to tell us how you prefer to enter the lyrics when
> they are sometimes shared.  Is there one Lyrics for alto, 
> one for alto-tenor-together, and one for tenor? or do you
> just have alto and tenor and put skips in the tenor when they
> are together?  is there an alignAboveContext involved?

the smallest snippet I could produce (in 10 minutes) is attached.

Funeral Sentences_2.12.ly
Description: Binary data

> 
> The old LilyPond collapsed everything in each system to take
> only the vertical space needed.  For lyrics, it seems that did
> pretty much the right thing. The new LilyPond will spread things
> vertically to use the space available, which reveals her 
> ignorance in how things are supposed to be attached.
> 
> Lilypond lets us associate lyrics (for timing purposes, \lyricsto)
> to any voice anywhere, so to have her know whether they should go
> close to the next staff up or down seems to require a search for
> which Staff contains the associate Voice. Another approach would
> be to put a staff-affinity=#CENTER marker at the top and bottom
> of each system, so the bit of code producing that warning "staff-
> affinities should only decrease" would ensure that Lyrics have
> 'affinity' pointing to something within their own system.

This will probably make a ton of sense once I understand what a 
'staff-affinity' is, but just reading this, it looks like I have to put a 
marker at the top and bottom of each system so that lilypond knows where the 
systems begin and end. That certainly shouldn't be the case. If lilypond 
decides where the system breaks are, how am I supposed to know where to put a 
marker? And I don't know anything about the warning, why affinities should only 
decrease, what would cause it, and how to fix it. All in all, it makes no 
sense, and looks like a lot of stuff that (w|c|sh)ould be handled by the 
programming which I, as a user, don't really deal with

> 
> I have been meaning to work on that centering-lyrics snippet
> (and will not be hurt if somebody else steals the job) to try
> to boil down the complicated overrides into a small useful set
> of predefines, so we can just say: \lyricAttachDown or 
> \lyricsCenter or \lyricsCollapse and remain blissfully ignorant
> of the complexity underneath.


Based on the last sentence there, am I to understand that lilypond doesn't 
really know where to attach lyrics to? It makes sense for the lyrics to be 
placed as close as reasonably possible to the bottom of the staff containing 
the voice they're attached to. That was the old behavior, yes? At least, that's 
what I've understood from the beginning of the explanation. 

Maybe if I understood the value of whatever changes are now possible that 
weren't possible with the old method, it would make understanding what needs to 
be done to get the old behavior back. And then, once that's clear, I would even 
be willing to try and write something that explains how the new method works, 
and what it makes possible. As it is, it just appears to change things for the 
sake of changing things. And, as has already once been incorrectly assumed, the 
average user will see the new behavior and think that the program is broken, or 
that the new behavior is a regression against (all logic) the previous version.