Re: Stencils

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

David Feuer wrote:
>            "they are moved by the latter amount."
>            "@var{first} and @var{second} may also be '() or #f.")
>
> I'm a little confused.  What exactly happens when the reference points
> are too close?  And why does this happen at the stencil level? 
> Shouldn't all the decisions be made above that?  A few more things:
>
> 1.  Are stencils just created as an intermediate output format, or do
> they participate in the process of adjusting the music to arrange all
> the pieces as well as possible?

They participate, in that their dimension fields are used for various 
computations.  Simply said,  a stencil is a combination of output format 
and a bbox.

> 2.  The more I read the code and think about it, the more I think
> stencil interpretation should be pushed to the back end and written in
> Scheme.

what exactly do you want to push back?

> 3.  I really don't like stencil leaves being arbitrary scheme
> expressions that produce output.  When the back end can't look inside
> the box, it can't figure out the best way to deal with the contents.

Perhaps, but it was an easy solution for what we needed: a way of 
having pluggable backends with minimum fuss.

--

Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen

LilyPond Software Design
 -- Code for Music Notation
http://www.lilypond-design.com