Re: Instrument names

[Phil Holmes]

Phil Holmes wrote Tuesday, July 24, 2012 4:28 PM


> I'd like to look at fixing 766. Could someone suggest the best way to go
> about this, please? One option would seem to be to calculate the length of
> the text of the instrument names, and set the indent on the score equal to
> that plus a bit. Is this the best way? It seems to me that a system based
> more on the way the other system grobs avoid each other would be better,
> but i don't know whether that's practical or even really better.

OK - some background to this.  766 is the issue concerning instrument names 
and how lilypond fails to account for them when setting line widths, with 2 
results: 1) users get long names disappearing off the left of the page, and 
need to mess about with indents to correct this.  2) Whenever there is a 
piece of code containing an instrument name in the docs, we need to be aware 
of the need to mess about with line-width to stop my hated black bars from 
appearing.  So as a bug, it's one of those that, by default, produces awful, 
really ugly output.  It also makes document writing more of a pain.

I've done the looking into the code that I can manage.  I know that indents 
are worked in output-def.cc:line_dimensions_int.  This returns a linewidth 
and an indent, with a normal indent when called with second parameter 0, 
otherwise it's a short-indent.  So it would be easy to add something to the 
indent here to take account of intrument names.

The instrument name is created in instrument-name-engraver.cc.  This makes a 
Spanner *text_spanner_; with text_spanner_ = make_spanner ("InstrumentName", 
SCM_EOL);

So it appears that there is a Spanner called InstrumentName with the details 
of the instrument name.  Is there any way of accessing this within 
output-def.cc?

--
Phil Holmes