Comment #4 on issue 3160 by [email protected]: chord names pushed into the staff http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=3160
I think that an explicit removal is the wrong thing to do: a zero-height line is a "neutral element" when stacking boxes (without padding, though). Now we are stacking skylines, and empty lyrics again should correspond to a "neutral element". For skylines, the difference between a zero-height box and nothing at all is very significant. Instead of juggling around with workarounds like \removeEmptyStaves, we need to make sure that skylines have "neutral elements" that don't change a contour, and that those neutral elements are produced by code supposed to have no visible output.
That's the fundamental issue that I see in need of addressing, and not addressing that will lead to a growing heap of various workarounds piling up in various areas of LilyPond. I think that it is very important to get consistent and predictable behavior from skylines first, and then make any callers work with that consistent and predictable behavior rather than all callers working around inconsistent and only loosely predictable behavior.
