Staff spacing, Lyrics and Braille

[Ralph Little]

Hi,
I have been experimenting with system spacing and I have noticed some
curious effects.
In the pursuit of completing my Braille stuff, I have been experimenting
with spacing where there is no Staff context.
For example, just lyrics, or Braille.

I expected the Braille/Lyrics to close up horizontally if there were no
notes to align to. However, horizontal spacing seems to occur whether
there are notes to align or not, which leads me to suspect that
horizontal alignment is handled externally by another engraver,
independent of notes. I admit that I haven't got into it  in great
detail as yet, but it would seem to me that with music being expressed
more and more in different formats, assuming that there will be
conventional notation to align to is becoming less adequate.

If lyrics are longer, horizontal space is stretched to accommodate.
Could not spacing for notes be handled in the same way?

For example for n simultaneous contexts in a system, could not grobs be
aligned vertically, but spacing requirements be assigned to each context
independantly of each other. That way, the final spacing between events
is the longest spacing requirement of any simultaneous event? So, to
take an extreme example, if there was a system with simultaneous
BrailleStaff, Staff and Lyrics, each musical event is spaced by the
maximum requirement of any of them. Therefore, if Braille or lyrics is
typeset on it's own the only spacing requirement is that which is
required for the Braille or lyrics themselves, not an additional
assumption about musical spacing that is valid only for Staff.

Sorry if I'm talking out of my hat or have misunderstood something? :)

BTW, I will have something to submit shortly, but I'll wait until after
the next stable release for the following dev tree as it is still
experimental and does not yet fully support all of the Braille music
syntax. It's looking OK though! If anybody is interested enough to see
some samples I'll post some on a web site somewhere....

Regards,
Ralph

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