Re: Lead sheets: lyrics and chords, no melody?

[Christopher R. Maden]

On 3/3/19 12:40 AM, Aaron Hill wrote:
> It is a messy hack, but here is something:

[...]

> My goal was to leave the lead sheet snippet from the docs intact and
> do everything with \layout.  There are probably other grobs that will
> need \omitting depending on your music.  Spacing will almost
> certainly require tweaking to work.  I also opted to left-align the
> lyrics to match the chords, as the alignment looks better without the
> notes.

Thanks!  That’s a good start... I had tried the approach of \remove-ing 
a bunch of engravers from Staff and Voice, but this looks cleaner.

It does leave a bunch of note flags, dots, and phrasing slurs decorating 
the lyrics...

I was able to clean most of that up by adding:

  \omit Dots
  \omit Flag
  \omit InstrumentName
  \omit PhrasingSlur.

to the \Staff context.

I also added \omit BarNumber to the \Score context.  Oddly, the 8 from 
the "treble_8" clef I was using lingered even with \omit Clef in the 
\Staff context; I had to \remove Clef_engraver from the Staff to kill that.

I am struggling with the spacing now.  Based on Aaron’s second message, 
I currently have this:

      \context {
        \ChordNames
        \override VerticalAxisGroup.nonstaff-relatedstaff-spacing =
          #'((basic-distance . 0) (minimum-distance . 1)
             (padding . 4) (stretchability . 0))
        \override ChordName.extra-offset = #'(0 . -1)
      }
      \context {
        \Lyrics
        \override VerticalAxisGroup.nonstaff-relatedstaff-spacing =
          #'((basic-distance . 0) (minimum-distance . 1)
             (padding . -2) (stretchability . 0))
        \override LyricText.self-alignment-X = #LEFT
        \override LyricSpace.minimum-distance = #1
        \omit LyricExtender
      }

which gives the attached results.[*]  If I increase the ChordNames 
padding to 5, the last line gets pushed to the next page, and everything 
opens way up.  Changing the basic or minimum distance properties just 
pushes the chords away from their associated lyrics, not from the 
preceding line.  The nonstaff-nonstaff-spacing property doesn’t seem to 
affect anything.

I’ve trawled the internals pretty extensively at this point, and this is 
probably close enough for my guitarist, but any further pointers on the 
spacing would be most welcome.

~Chris

[*] “Fiddler’s Green” is copyright © 1970 March Music, Ltd.
--
Chris Maden, text nerd
<URL: http://crism.maden.org/ >
Emperor Norton had the right idea.

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