Hi Aaron,
I apologize too if I'm going to use words that can appear a bit rude. This is only for making the goal clearer, and I state again that without your great help I could not do my editor.
Now: there's a misunderstanding in your reply too.
I'm not focusing on the *manual* tweaking. The opposite is true: I'm focusing on the *automatic* tweaking.
It appears to me that you all are convinced that I want to bypass this Lilypond feature in order to make a WYSIWYG editor.
That's absolutely false. WYSIWYG editors are IMHO too much time consuming. Then I want to put in my editor the automatic algos of Lilypond. X/Y-offset is one of them. I'm not interested in *manual* shifting the brackets. My editor already does that with the extra-offset properties, and it works. Instead, I'm focusing on the automatic placement of the other near objects as a consequence ("avoid collisions method"). Doing that manually is very tedious and I want to avoid it.
Don't interpret the thread as a "automatic vs manual placement method*; instead see it as "automatic 1) vs automatic 2) placement".
In addition: you say that you disagree that everyone has to do fine tuning. I think that the important thing is to make not me or you to do fine tuning. The important thing is to allow *Lilypond* to make it, if required.
It would be really a waste that a so wonderful tool can't accomplish that only because a dummy value is not pulled out.
Without a proper behavior of the "\offset" command you cannot do nor the automatic 2) placement, nor a fine tuning.
Best,
Paolo
It seems
(I apologize if that
is coming across sarcastically, but I am afraid I lack better
wordsmithing.)