Re: alignment of unattached lyrics - opinions needed

[David Kastrup]

Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi hackers,
>
> I need your opinion on this to proceed with generalizing alignment
> stuff (https://codereview.appspot.com/7768043).
>
> What should be the the desired behaviour of "standalone" lyrics, i.e.
> lyrics that don't have associatedVoice set?  If you look at this
> snippet (output attached),
>
> { c'2 c' d' d' }
> \addlyrics { foo bar la mmm }
>
> <<
>   { c'2 c' d' d' }
>   \new Lyrics { \lyricmode  { foo2 bar la mmm } }
>>>
>
> you'll see that lyrics attached to notes (\addlyrics sets
> associatedVoice) are centered, while "independent" lyrics are
> left-aligned.  I think that this behaviour is suboptimal - in my
> opinion it would be better if lyrics were centered in both cases.
> What are your opinions?

Without an associated voice, there is, with some likeliness, no longer a
strict per-note relation with lyrics.  In this case, lyrics are likely
to _not_ be split into syllables.  Typical use cases are songbooks
_without_ notes, consisting just of chords and words.  Why use LilyPond
in the first place for that?  Because it makes transposing easy.

I am not sure this is enough reason to make the default alignment with
and without \addlyrics different, but at least it should be reason
enough to make the alignment configurable in a very straightforward way.

-- 
David Kastrup