The default is to join everything, and we revert to that with a warning if you specify too few connections. (Full disclosure: you can't hide one half of a line crossing a break and show the other half, but unless there's some pressing need, I'm going to forget I noticed this....)
--Change the distance from text to line with TextSpanner.line-offset, which defaults to #'(0.0 . 0.0).
Additionally, there are warnings for overlaps. There's no attempt at fixing these. I wouldn't know how to influence spacing.
By the way, is there a way to get spacing to accommodate really long left/right texts with ordinary TextSpanners without resorting to \newSpacingArea, manual breaks, and the like? I don't find a mechanism: \textLengthOn doesn't seem to work...
Enjoy--
David
P.S. One area of further improvement would be the input syntax. Any suggestions for making this more user-friendly? I can't figure out how to get markups to process properly without that off-putting