Re: Odd vertical spacing of lyrics

[James Bailey]

On Jan 19, 2011, at 7:25 PM, James Bailey wrote:

> 
> On Jan 19, 2011, at 1:27 AM, Keith OHara wrote:
>> …
>> 
>> The old LilyPond collapsed everything in each system to take
>> only the vertical space needed.  For lyrics, it seems that did
>> pretty much the right thing. The new LilyPond will spread things
>> vertically to use the space available, which reveals her 
>> ignorance in how things are supposed to be attached.
>> 
>> Lilypond lets us associate lyrics (for timing purposes, \lyricsto)
>> to any voice anywhere, so to have her know whether they should go
>> close to the next staff up or down seems to require a search for
>> which Staff contains the associate Voice. Another approach would
>> be to put a staff-affinity=#CENTER marker at the top and bottom
>> of each system, so the bit of code producing that warning "staff-
>> affinities should only decrease" would ensure that Lyrics have
>> 'affinity' pointing to something within their own system.
> 
> …
>> 
>> I have been meaning to work on that centering-lyrics snippet
>> (and will not be hurt if somebody else steals the job) to try
>> to boil down the complicated overrides into a small useful set
>> of predefines, so we can just say: \lyricAttachDown or 
>> \lyricsCenter or \lyricsCollapse and remain blissfully ignorant
>> of the complexity underneath.

After some fiddling, apparently, all I needed to do was add \override 
VerticalAxisGroup #'staff-affinity = #CENTER to the main lyrics. That solved 
all of my problems. I won't even pretend to understand what exactly the 
affinities do, but it worked for me.