Re: adding engravers

[David Kastrup]

Noeck <address@hidden> writes:

> Inside a \with context or for the default context, this is short and
> nice to write. But it gets more lengthy for general settings in the
> layout block when different contexts are addressed. I always have to
> look it up as for the former #' syntax.

Perhaps time to learn what each line means.

> Is there a shorter way for a general setting like this?
>   \layout {
>     \context {
context definition follows:
>       \Staff
like \music copying a music variable, \Staff copies a context
definition.  The salient point is that this context definition contains
a \name "Staff", so without overriding \name (which is perfectly
feasible), the new definition will get stored back into \Staff again.
>       \consists "Ambitus_engraver"

This changes the context definition.

>     }
>   }
>
> Would it be difficult to implement something like this?
>
> \layout {
>   \consists Staff.Ambitus_engraver
> }

That would only make any kind of sense if you could actually write
\consists Staff.Ambitus_engraver also in mid-music.  However, engravers
are not usually prepared to be added and removed from already live
contexts, so this would likely cause huge messes and new bugs.

> or
>
> \layout {
>   \add Staff.Ambitus_engraver
> }

That does not resemble anything else.  I'm not in favor of adding random
syntactic variations of already existing features.

-- 
David Kastrup