After looking (fruitlessly) through the manual, checking a bit through the mailing list archives, and experimenting over and over, I think I may have figured out the problem I'm having, as well as a hint of its solution. It appears that LilyPond sets horizontal spacing for vocal music without regard for #'shortest-duration-space or #'spacing-increment. The result is (to me) ugly and difficult to read, and utterly unlike any other vocal music I've seen. If I am wrong, or if there is a good way to work around this, I would love to hear about it.
My thoughts on a possible solution (rough, because I don't know any of the program details): The natural space following a note in vocal music (the amount of space it will have if ragged-right is in effect) should never be less than the space calculated as usual using #'shortest-duration-space and #'spacing-increment. The current behavior could be obtained by setting these to 0 in vocal sections (using a new spacing area), or (probably better--see below) by using different variables to control spacing in vocal and non-vocal sections. If the lyrics font size is set to 0 throughout the piece, the music should be engraved exactly the way it would be if there were no lyrics (except for vertical spacing). If possible, it would be nice for the effective vocal-shortest-duration-space to be set based on something roughly like the third quartile of the lengths of the syllables attached to the common shortest notes, but never tighter than the user-set vocal-shortest-duration-space. That way, the text would be fairly tight in faster parts, as it is now in all parts, and looser in slower parts. David Feuer _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
