Hi Carl, > Thinking about this in terms of Excel cells, where they can extend as far as > possible as long as there are no contents in adjacent cells.... > > Might it be possible for the lyrics engraver to add something like a > lyricPlaceholder grob into adjacent note columns that had no lyricText grob? > The extent of the lyricPlaceholder could be the negative of the extent of the > lyricText in the current column. > The lyricText in the current column could be aligned in the opposite > direction of the adjacent column.
To my mind, an earlier — and hopefully simpler? — stage/implementation could be the addition of a "NoteColumnGroup" [or similar] grob (?) which would allow the user to say (e.g.) “in this three quarter-note chunk of music, the notes should be ‘correctly spaced’, any attached items should be moved to avoid internal collisions, and then the entire resulting chunk should be considered atomic for spacing purposes”. (The LyricWord implementation might be a good analogue/model?) I would estimate that 90% of my note-spacing issues (and thus edition-engraver tweak-writing time) are of the “I just want this set of triplet eighth notes to be evenly spaced” kind — the thing I'm thinking of (above) would solve those problems completely. Now of course I realize the implementation of this idea is not necessarily trivial… but I don't think we need to throw the whole spacing engine under the bus on the first step of an [attempted] improvement plan. Thoughts? Kieren.
