A text mark in Lilypond is represented by a grob called a RehearsalMark; the grob for a tempo marking is called a MetronomeMark.
I wonder whether perhaps these names reflect something about the history of Lilypond: they are certainly not accurate descriptions of what the objects are used for - e.g. very often tempo markings make no reference to a metronome. I also suspect that history gives a clue to why Lilypond allows only one of each of these objects at any point in a score unless one performs some sort of programming acrobatics to work around the restriction. In fact this restriction, certainly in the case of RehearsalMark, has no logic to it. So either it is somehow hard-wired at a deep level, or it must be there presumably because at one time it did make sense. The clue is in the names, perhaps. It generally does not make sense to have more than one actual rehearsal mark at a single point in a piece of music (although I can think of rare circumstances in which there might be editorial reasons for doing so). But the RehearsalMark object is now not used only for rehearsal marks. For instance, even according to the documentation it is used for putting a fermata sign over a barline. Now, there is no reason on earth why a fermata sign and a rehearsal mark should never appear at the same point, yet Lilypond throws out a warning and refuses to print one of the objects unless we go to extra lengths to get what we actually want. A RehearsalMark is actually a very useful thing for aligning something with a barline - just recently I wanted it for the titles of the various sections of a piece. Similarly, there might be times when the alignment (or other) characteristics of MetronomeMark are useful for some other text, which might or might not occur at the same point as an actual tempo marking. The only case where having more than one of either of these objects causes a problem (only for midi output and easy for Lilypond to deal with, even then) is if 2 actual metronome marks occur at the same point. Would it not make better sense for Lilypond to accept what is asked for without complaining and print all the requested items? We don't actually need to have a warning about the supposed error if we can see the result in the output. If it is a genuine mistake (e.g. putting "Allegro" in most parts and "allegro" in another) then we can see that, and it won't take long to locate the error. So my question is: is there any good reason why Lilypond still does not allow multiple marks or tempo markings? If the answer to that question really is "yes", then perhaps we could have an additional grob or 2 which have the same characteristics as the existing one(s) but without the restriction on numbers. E.g. could we have a TextMark grob in addition to RehearsalMark? David _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user