Fixing overlapping notation

[Anthonys Lists]

You can tell I've looked at the relevant section of the manual ...

But I have two problems bugging me at the moment, and it's related to a 
problem I have in general with lilypond - it tries to avoid collsions by 
separating stuff vertically. How do I tell it to push them apart 
*horizontally*. Two current bugbears ...

I have seven bars rest in a part. I want some markup starting at the 
first barline, and different markup ending at the last barline. If a 
part has notes, those markups will separate horizontally naturally - how 
can I force that to happen when there's that rest?

And secondly, I want a coda sign at the end of an alternative. Of 
course, it collides with the repeat spanner :-( The problem with the 
docu or lsr snippet I found (can't remember which) was (a) it supposedly 
shortened all spanners - which I don't want - and (b) I couldn't get it 
to work anyway. I do have a different \alternative example that 
explicity codes each spanner without actually using "\alternative", but 
I couldn't get that to work either.

If we're discussing usability, I think this is a major sticking point 
for lilypond - colliding notation is VERY common, and lily really 
doesn't handle it very well at all :-( When engraving parts I'm often 
scrabbling for space, and as soon as lily starts staircasing markup it 
wastes a heck of a lot

Cheers,
Wol