Dear All,
I frequently need to have overlapping horizontal brackets. This means that I have to add hidden notes to my scores to attach them to. (Brackets won't attach to spacer rests unless they live in a Staff context, in which case you can't have more than one at a time. Adding brackets to both contexts creates two brackets at a time.)
This means I need to add a voice with notes that are a) invisible and b) have no effect on the spacing of other music on the staff. I haven't found a way to do this, or even figured out how to predict what will happen when I try. My main options are a) \hideNotes, b) stencil=##f, c) stencil=#point-stencil, or d) same as previous, but with rests.
So far I have found that every option has /some/ effect on the surrounding music. In some cases option a) is best, and sometimes another option. In a complex score it's hard to even know which is best unless you make a small example to test.
It's hard to create a minimal example that demonstrates this, so I have attached an image and accompanying code to illustrate. I'm only concerned about the notes (brackets always require tweaking in these situations). In this case option c) looks best, but there are other times when #point-stencil produces crazy output. Normally a) is best, but as you can see it sometimes causes long stems and such, meaning I have to choose the pitches of invisible notes carefully...
I have battled with this for a long time, so any help would be much appreciated.
Kevin
test.pdf
test.ly