Re: Date in the footer and Headers/Footers/Titles

[Jonathan Kulp]

Chip wrote:
> There has been recent discussion on -user regarding getting the date in the
> footer. One of the problems in finding the solution has been the docs
> themselves. I have a suggestion that may, in the long run, help 
> straighten a few
> things out. But first I want to suggest this: move the section '3.2 
> Titles and
> headers' found in the NOTATION Reference to the LM. Why? Because the NR 
> should
> be about Notation, and headers/footers/titles are not notation.

I don't know that this needs to be moved to LM, but I can understand the 
confusion in the NR title, I suppose.  A quick scan of the table of 
contents shows that it deals with more than just notation, but maybe it 
would be worth considering changing the title of NR to something like 
"Lilypond General Reference" or "Lilypond User Manual."  I note that 
when the docs are built, the filename for NR is simply "lilypond.pdf." 
This would imply that it's considered the basic Lilypond manual.

[snip]
> titles and has nothing to do with the footer. I was also given a link to 
> a work
> in the LilyMusic web site in which I found the code that with minor 
> altering
> does exactly what I was asking for. This link didn't come from one of the
> lilypond 'developers', it came from a very helpful user. 
Many of the answers on user-list come from helpful users. This shouldn't 
be surprising.  It's the user list. :)

Seems all I get
> from,
> well, one, developer, is grief and no help.

I read the thread and saw that you got both grief and help. It might be 
that the help you got didn't look like help, but it was there 
nonetheless.  The help convention on the list is to allow users to 
connect some dots in most cases instead of just copying-and-pasting code 
that will fix the problem.  The person who pointed you to the snippet 
with the current date in the title gave enough information to show that 
a markup was used in the subtitle (I think it was a subtitle) and it 
shouldn't be too much of a reach to put a \markup in the tagline as well.

> With all that said here is the code for the footer that solves the 
> problem -
> ---------------
> tagline = \markup {
> Engraved on
> \simple #(strftime "%b %d, %Y" (localtime (current-time)))
> with \with-url #"http://lilypond.org/web/";
> { LilyPond \simple #(lilypond-version) (http://lilypond.org/) }
> }
> --------------
> This code should be in the section that describes the footer, where ever 
> it may
> be (currently NR 3.2.2). And maybe also in the LSR 'Titles Adding the 
> current
> date to a score'. Though that whole section should be in the LM '2.5 
> Final touches'.

Well, a tagline isn't the same as a footer, since a tagline only appears 
on the last page. Really, the relevant issue is that \markup mode can be 
used in any of these variables in the \header block.  Perhaps it would 
be appropriate to put something in the index or in a @seealso that 
points to "tagline," though.  I don't know.  There's already a snippet 
that shows how to put the current date in the context of a \markup, so 
there's no need to duplicate it as long as it's clear that you can use a 
\markup in the tagline, too.  The manual's part on Text shows that you 
can put a \markup pretty much anywhere in any score.

Best wishes,

Jon
--
Jonathan Kulp
http://www.jonathankulp.com