Re: piano centered dynamics

[Mats Bengtsson]

James Bailey wrote:

> Thanks, I made the offset 2.5 to match all of the others, but I still  
> really don't understand all of the engravers and spanners this  
> template modifies, which makes me kind of sad.
Honestly, I don't think anybody understands exactly why the
template looks as it does. Probably, it would look differently if
anybody sat down to do it again from scratch based on the
capabilities of todays LilyPond. As far as I can understand,
based on some quick experiments, these extra-offset values
are used to compensate for something caused by the value
\override Dynamics.DynamicLineSpanner #'direction = #DOWN
which is set by default in LilyPond. If you change the value to
#UP, everything ends up too high unless you do the corresponding
extra-offset settings in the opposite direction. Unfortunately,
you get an error message if you set the direction to #CENTER.

One alternative approach is provided in 
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-lilypond/2005-08/msg00130.html
Note that those lines of code were written for version 2.7.4 or so,
so you should use convert-ly to update the syntax to correspond
to your current version.

> And, is it just me, or did you get the same kind of problem that I  
> got? Should this be added to the manual, or am I just  
> misunderstanding it?

If we should keep the current template in the manual, we should
certainly add it or figure out a cleaner solution.

  /Mats