Re: fermatas above notes

[Mats Bengtsson]

> Thanks very much, it works.  Now, to combine these items: how do I add
> padding to a fermata?
> 
> Mike

To find the answer to this question and many similar
questions, visit www.lilypond.org, click on
User Manual, then on "Internals: Auto generated ..."
and scroll back til you find the list of "grob"s
(shorthand for graphical objects). With some imagination,
and some reading in the rest of the manual, you could guess 
that the fermata is a Script, so you click on "Grob Script"
and then you could follow the links to the different
"interfaces" to see what properties are available.
The general way to set a property of a graphical object is
\property contextname.grobname \override #'propertyname = #value
Here, contextname is the name of the type of context where
you want to make the setting, if you want to change something
in the full score use "Score", if you just want to change
it on a single staff, use "Staff", and so on. Thus, the
context name specifies the scope of the setting (properties
are inherited by all contexts within the context you specify).
The name of the grob (remember, graphical object) is "Script"
in this case, the propertyname is "padding". In general, the
value is specified in Scheme (a LISP dialect) and from the
documentation of the side-position-interface you could
find that for "property", the value should be a number. 
To conclude, use 

\property Staff.Script \override #'padding = #2

If the value should hold for all staffs, say, in a score, 
it's easiest to set it in the \paper section using a slightly
different syntax:

\score{
 ...


  \paper{
    ...
    \translator{
      \StaffContext
      Script \override #'padding = #2
    }
  }
}

You can also find lots of useful examples in the directory
input/test/.

    /Mats