Re: names of vertical spacing dimensions

[Alexander Kobel]

On 2010-10-12 14:27, James wrote:
> On 12/10/2010 12:54, David Kastrup wrote:
> > James<address@hidden> writes:
> > > Why do we have
> > > 'top-system' but 'system-bottom' and not instead, 'bottom-system'?
> >
> > Because there is no system after the bottom?
>
> ?
>
> I'll stop if I am really showing my ignorance (I am not a code
> developer), but from a user-point of view it would be much more
> 'logical' if the naming was split *consistently* into
>
> What you are changing (system, markup, title etc) and where you are changing.

That's what I meant when I wrote after-title-spacing and 
before-title-spacing (as is) are good names IMHO.
/But:/ The more consistent naming scheme is the new one; on this I agree 
with Mark, Carl, David, and some of the others.

All these variables describe vertical spacing, which means there is 
always a Foo above the space and a Baz below the space.  Thus, 
foo-baz-space sounds fine, doesn't it?  (This logic implies 
system-bottom-spacing, of course.)
Of course, the user usually thinks of your three-divisioned scheme 
titling/headers, music, markups, but Lily's state of the art is that 
titling and top-level markups are the same.  If we were to introduce 
this distinction as a separate, well, 
"object-taking-vertical-top-level-space" category, we'd have even more 
meaningful and understandable names; but this looks like it's /far/ out 
of the scope of this patch and discussion.

And as to "where you are changing": The settings just do not allow 
controlling the spacing independent of the subsequent element.  That'd 
look like - similar to the (horizontal) space-alists for some grobs - 
the following, if I understand you correctly:
  after-staff-spacing = #'((Staff . ((space . 5) (stretchability 7)))
                           (Lyrics . ((minimum-distance . 7)))
                           (Markup . ((padding . 3)))
                           (Titling . ((space . 8) (stretchability 20) 
(minimum-distance . 8) (padding . 5))))
... and so on.  This looks theoretically possible, but to me it does not 
look better than the current approach.  Rather worse: what if you want 
to change just a single entry? Rewrite the whole thing?

I see your point, but do you think it's worth it before GLISS?


Cheers,
Alexander