Re: Centered text lines in markuplist

[David Kastrup]

Andrew Bernard <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi David,
>
> I am unable to understand your response. Is my mail not clear? I
> explicitly diagrammed what would be good.
>
> At no point in this topic have I offered criticism of any kind of
> lilypond, or your work. Others would verify that I am sure.
>
> Whence this aggression in your reply David? It is entirely unjustified.
>
> In English, which I now must assume is not your primary language since
> you seem to not understand perfectly polite writing, to say one 'would
> settle for something' is one perfectly normal way of saying that such
> as solution would be good, fine, and satisfactory.

>From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:

  settle v
  12: accept despite lack of complete satisfaction; "We settled
      for a lower price"

<URL:http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/settle+for>


settle for something

    to agree to accept something (even though something else would be
    better). We wanted a redone, but settled for a blue one. \I\Ask your
    grocer for Wilson's canned corn—the best corn in cans. Don't settle
    for less.

    McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs. © 2002
    by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
    

settle for something

    to agree to or accept something, although it is not exactly what you
    want Patients will have to settle for fewer tests because rising
    costs have made them too expensive.
    
    Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms Copyright © Cambridge
    University Press 2003. Reproduced with permission.


settle for

    Accept or be satisfied with as a compromise, as in He really wanted
    a bigger raise but decided to settle for what they
    offered. [Mid-1900s]

    The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine
    Ammer. Copyright © 2003, 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992
    Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
    Company. All rights reserved.


settle for
    v.
    To accept something in spite of not being completely satisfied: I
    had to settle for a lower wage than the one I requested.

    The American Heritage® Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs. Copyright © 2005
    by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by
    Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.


Looks like my mottled grasp of English rubbed off on other people.
That's the price of being old: you never remember which trends you
actually started yourself.

> In what way is the small diagram I included unclear?

After saying that you'll "settle for" the line being left-justified with
the other lines, your diagram states "last line can do this".  Again,
this sounds like something you don't actually consider optimal but
propose it as some sort of least-resistance compromise, otherwise "last
line should do this" would have seemed more appropriate, at least to
someone as unversed in the subtleties of English language as I happen to
be.

And before you even start, you state "Tools such as InDesign offer all
the possibilities for the last line, of which there are several, as you
know."  Again this sounds like you consider left-alignment of the last
line as a subset at best of what you would really consider complete
support.

So what are we actually supposed to aiming for (rather than settling
for)?

I suppose you could _settle_ for something like

#(define-markup-command (center-to layout props width arg)
  (number? markup?)
  #:properties ((line-width))
  (interpret-markup layout props
   #{ \markup { \hspace #(* 0.5 (- line-width width))
                \override #`(line-width . ,width) #arg }
      #}))

\markuplist
\center-to #60
\justified-lines {
  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus
  scelerisque justo ut posuere aliquam. Integer aliquet eu nunc a
  iaculis. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Maecenas ornare leo non est
  hendrerit, ac ultricies justo porttitor. Nullam pulvinar mollis
  scelerisque. Pellentesque ut quam quis nibh laoreet consequat. Etiam vitae
  felis eu leo sodales vulputate.
}

but that does not really tell us what kind of facility or feature is
actually missing in LilyPond.  We don't want to add stuff that works
only for a subset of applications, so the question is what should
actually be there.

How would you have desired your input to look?

-- 
David Kastrup