Re: vertical line spacing of a markup

[Olivier Biot]

On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 8:56 PM, David Nalesnik <address@hidden> wrote:

To be honest, I don't know much about typographical conventions, so
I'm not sure whether the attached file has much utility.  Here, I've
adapted the definition of `stack-lines' so that you can turn off the
compromise mentioned above--namely that the value of baseline-skip is
only used if there is no overlap of lines  This is done by overriding
the property `strict'.  I've set it to #f by default (normal spacing)
in the adaptation of \column in the file.

Hi David, yes, I think your contribution is a significant step forward in LilyPond text handling!

Strict spacing only has any noticeable effect when lines are close
together.  The attached example shows how the same column looks (on
the left) by default when LilyPond ignores baseline-skip, and with
strict spacing.  Note that the "p" and "q" are allowed to interleave
in the right column.

Crystal clear to me.

If something like this is useful, the definition of 'stack-lines'
might be modified in scm/stencil.scm.  Of course, an additional
argument would be required in whatever markup-command definition
includes that procedure.  I haven't tested this extensively to know
what if any problems might show up.

This should make it somehow into LilyPond core text handling routines as an alternative (the preferred) text line handling routine.

As a matter of fact, I gave up entirely working with text in LilyPond due to my extensive and unfruitful tests so far, and I opted for lilypond-book and LaTeX. It's somehow funny to resume working with LaTeX after a 13 year hiatus :) Maybe I can contribute to improving the (currently rather limited) lilypond-book documentation. Did you know for instance that adding links in PDF files with lilypond-book can only be done with pdflatex and the hyperref LaTeX package? Did you know you need to provide explicitly the absolute paths to ALL directories containing LilyPond sources that you include in your project? Did you know lilypond-book extracts the required information from a "lytex" file by means of heuristics and hence sometimes can miss the mark? Did you know the end result can be fabulous? To me the combination of LaTeX and lilypond-book is ideal: it's the combinaiton of the best of both worlds.

Best regards,

Olivier