Re: centering of instrument names

[Joe Neeman]

On Wed, 2009-07-15 at 22:07 +0100, Neil Puttock wrote:
> 2009/5/30 Joe Neeman <address@hidden>:
> 
> > The sanest behaviour IMO is the behaviour of your current patch, but
> > with a different meaning for 'padding. I can see two ways to do this:
> > the quick&dirty way to get this is to replace
> > instrument-name::calc-combined-delimiters-offset with
> > instrument-name::calc-min-distance-to-support, which goes through all
> > the instrument names and finds the minimum distance necessary between
> > any instrument name and any grob in its support. The nicer way to get
> > the same effect would be to create an InstrumentNameColumn grob that is
> > the X-parent of all the InstrumentNames and do the instrument name
> > positioning in ly:instrument-name-column::calc-positioning-done.
> 
> I had a stab at creating an InstrumentNameColumn, which acknowledges
> InstrumentNames, but it doesn't work properly because InstrumentName
> grobs appear to be static unless there's a name change, meaning they
> only get acknowledged once.  I placed the new engraver in the Score
> context, but it missed all but the first system's InstrumentNames;
> setting a new shortInstrumentName before the next system resulted in
> only that grob being acknowledged.

Right, because there's only one InstrumentName. But if your
InstrumentNameColumn is a spanner and it spans the whole staff, it will
get broken up into lots of little InstrumentNameColumns, one for each
system. And each of those InstrumentNameColumns will contain the broken
piece of the InstrumentName that corresponds to the same system.

Joe