Re: Flexible lyric alignment

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Carl,

> Thinking about this in terms of Excel cells, where they can extend as far as 
> possible as long as there are no contents in adjacent cells....
> 
> Might it be possible for the lyrics engraver to add something like a 
> lyricPlaceholder grob into adjacent note columns that had no lyricText grob?
> The extent of the lyricPlaceholder could be the negative of the extent of the 
> lyricText in the current  column.
> The lyricText in the current column could be aligned in the opposite 
> direction of the adjacent column.

To my mind, an earlier — and hopefully simpler? — stage/implementation could be 
the addition of a "NoteColumnGroup" [or similar] grob (?) which would allow the 
user to say (e.g.) “in this three quarter-note chunk of music, the notes should 
be ‘correctly spaced’, any attached items should be moved to avoid internal 
collisions, and then the entire resulting chunk should be considered atomic for 
spacing purposes”. (The LyricWord implementation might be a good 
analogue/model?)

I would estimate that 90% of my note-spacing issues (and thus edition-engraver 
tweak-writing time) are of the “I just want this set of triplet eighth notes to 
be evenly spaced” kind — the thing I'm thinking of (above) would solve those 
problems completely.

Now of course I realize the implementation of this idea is not necessarily 
trivial… but I don't think we need to throw the whole spacing engine under the 
bus on the first step of an [attempted] improvement plan.

Thoughts?
Kieren.