Re: including gregorian.ly breaks lyrics alignment in melismas

[Trevor Daniels]

Janek Warchoł wrote Tuesday, December 28, 2010 3:28 PM


> 2010/12/27 Trevor Daniels <address@hidden>
>
> > I know next to nothing about ancient notation, but whoever wrote
> > gregorian.ly clearly intended this behaviour as the file contains
> > the override
> >
> > \override SpacingSpanner #'packed-spacing = ##t
> >
> > on line 258, which requests notes to be packed as tightly as 
> > possible.
>
> I wouldn't describe this behaviour as "packing notes as tightly as
> possible" - the first note gets enormous amount of space. Don't 
> you
> think that packed-spacing is bugged itself?

No.  The space after the first note is to accommodate the lyrics 
word
attached to that note.  Just as in modern music the note spacing
adjusts as necessary to accommodate the lyrics.

> > This is presumably to enable the usual packed spacing of 
> > Gregorian
> > ligatures when the other facilities in gregorian.ly are used, so 
> > it is not
> > a bug.
>
> Regardless of whether this is intended or not, i suggest changing 
> the
> way it works, because it causes bad files to be easily produced: 
> just
> a few days ago Michael Dykes posted a question about the attached
> piece (in "Not enough space between certain words" thread). 
> Obviously
> he didn't know about the need to revert packed-spacing, which 
> resulted
> in a badly typeset piece.

gregorian.ly is supposed to be used as described in Typesetting 
Gregorian
chant, Section 2.9.4 in the Notation Reference.  You'll see there 
that there
are special staff and voice contexts that should be used.  AFAIK it 
is not
intended to be used without these contexts, and may well exhibit 
strange
behaviour if it is.  But I would not call such behaviour bugs.

That said, I'm sure there /are/ many bugs in the ancient notation 
section
and the documentation is clearly incomplete.  But none of the 
currently
active developers is expert enough in ancient notation  to touch 
this section,
so no changes are likely be made in the foreseeable future.  Unless, 
of
course, you or Michael would like to suggest patches.

Trevor