Hi Thomas,
thanks for your comment, this helps me refine my understanding of what's going on.
At the same time, while I do see that for other articulations (fermata, appoggiato) this parenting scheme works very well,
I remain wondering whether for the style of layout of the fingering indications that I am after, the appropriate thing to do could be to change the parenting altogether.
If we look at chord for a second, I see the <one-note-chord> thing as a trick because to me even for proper chords the whole FingeringColumn idea is also a weird concept: imagine you're in say C major, and you're laying out fingering on the left of a chord like Fm <f aes c'>: I'm very unclear whether the most readable solution is to have the fingerings stacked one atop each other in a column (thereby more distant from f and c because of the intervening flat on the aes) or if instead the fingerings on f and c should be set tighter to their corresponding note heads and just the aes fingering be displaced left horizontally, to allow for the flat. I would like to experiment with various possibilities there, visually. I suppose you could still displace horizontally inside the column, and then push it all inwards closer to the chord even if the bboxes will overlap a bit... I anticipate issues such as making sure the fingering for c' doesn't interfer with the ascender on the flat glyph, also.
Which brings me to a question: what consequence would it have to replace the X-parent and Y-parent of the fingering to be the NoteHead instead?
(I guess there will be a need to deal with the accidentals at a minimum)
And also: how would I go at discovering these consequences without using too much of you guys' time?
Thanks again,
Luca