Problem with Codas

[Shamus Hammons]

http://shamusworld.gotdns.org/music/one-small-child.pdf (see page 2,
bars 33-34)

I have a dream, that one day Lilypond will make codas first class
citizens instead of having to exist as a series of ugly hacks. In that
day, I could simply write \coda (with maybe some options) and Lilypond
would automagically do the right thing. Alas, that day is not today. :-(

In trying to make nice charts with Lilypond, I keep running into this
issue. It works fine for the most part, though it's still an ugly hack
that I have to put in multiple places for my charts to look right; but
when it fails it's frustrating beyond belief (for me, and, I suspect,
others).

I can hear the replies already: 'why don't you just put a \break in
there, why don't you just do x, y, and z to work around it?' But this is
the problem: the hacks are inconsistent, and while they might work in
some places they don't in others (like you see on page two, where the
4/4 time signature should be on bar 34 but instead is floating out in
space, and spurious bars are floating on the edge of the page). If you
somehow manage to make a change where the coda falls in the middle of
page, another change will push it to the side and screw things up.

So this my my call for an official path within the internals of Lilypond
to support codas for real without having to resort to ugly hacks that
work only some of the time (depending on where in the line they fall). I
am willing to undertake the coding of this feature, if someone can point
me in the right direction. But this needs to change. I am very
surprised, really, that such a common musical construct has no official
support in Lilypond.

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