Han-Wen's suggestion of using the staff margin engraver to print verse
numbers on songs almost works nicely. It allows one to put numbers just at
the beginning of the song, or at the beginning of each line. If the need to
manually enter a number for each verse can be worked around, good, but if
not, it is fairly inconsequential (as far as I am concerned, anyway).
There appears, however, to be a couple of limitations.
The most serious is that the stanza numbers are not correctly aligned with
the lyrics. They appear to be about 3pt lower. This also affects the
vertical spacing, so the numbered stanzas appear to be line-and-a-half
spaced.
The other is that the numbers appear in the staff margin, to the left of the
staff itself, rather than within the staff and just to the left of the
lyrics.
The latter problem can be worked around by entering some TeX code into the
number string to move it to the right, something like "\kern +8em 1." I
don't know enough TeX to know if the former problem can be similarly hacked.
In any case, this is not a particularly elegant solution to what is likely
to be a fairly common requirement of those who work with vocal music,
particularly if Lilypond users aren't supposed to have to know how to write
TeX code. How much work would be involved in writing a
"Verse_number_engraver" that would position the numbers in the correct
place, allow numbers to appear at the beginning of each line, or the
beginning of only the first line, or not at all, and calculate the stanza
number to use automatically but so that it can be overridden where
necessary?
If one of our gurus would be so kind as to give me their thoughts on the
merits of the idea, and how they would go about tackling it, I would be
happy to do the work required.
Glen Prideaux
