Re: Hymns and justified lyrics

[David Nalesnik]

Hi David,

On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 9:32 AM, David B. Stocker <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello LilyPonders,

I have a client who is working on a hymnal, and they would like for the beginning of the lines of verses to be left justified. The best way I can see to do this, from a visual standpoint, is to make the longest syllable on the first note of each line centered like it normally is, and then left-align all the others to that syllable.

Please see the attached minimal example.

First, I want to know whether it is possible to automate this behavior with LilyPond (I think it is).

And next, I'd like it if someone would point me in the direction of how to achieve this. My sense is that it is going to require some function-writing. I'm not a programmer (at all, really), but I'm not opposed to learning how to do this. Actually, I've been meaning to learn how to extend and modify some aspects of LilyPond for my own projects and doing so for a client-project is the best excuse I might have for jumping in.

Also, it's something that may be useful for other users as well, so at the very least it should be included in the LSR, and maybe made available for everyone in a future release.

I'm also open to collaboration on this, if anyone else is interested.

So, my hunch is that I'm going to write a function that queries the value of the left edge of the centered syllable in one verse, and then calculates the amount of offset to apply to the syllables at the same point in other verses on a case-by-case basis.

1) where can I start with learning this sort of tinkering, and 2) does anyone have other functions that behave in a similar way (fetching a value, making a calculation, and then applying it somewhere else) that I could study to figure out how I might do this?

You can find a function here which I believe does what you want:

http://www.mail-archive.com/lilypond-user%40gnu.org/msg81870.html

It's been a while, but it looks like you add \tagIt at the line beginning, to any of the verses,  This will center the lines based on the longest word and left-justify, regardless of the verse to which you attach the \tagIt.

Attached is the relevant code with your example.

Of course it would be great to automate this so you wouldn't have to worry about line breaks, and possibly that could be done here.

Hope this helps,

David 

P.S.  I see the following message in the above thread: 

http://www.mail-archive.com/lilypond-user%40gnu.org/msg81941.html

Possibly you could request the code from the poster.

tagIt.ly
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