Re: rest merging (willing to sponsor)

[Valentin Villenave]

Hello everyone,

Talking about merging rests and typography automation, I've often been
wondering if it could be possible for LilyPond to automatically
correct rests typography, even inside a single Voice context.

Let me explain myself: I don't know if I'm the only one here to have
bad typographical habits, but I use to write rests too quickly, and
therefore I often find myself with odd things such as

c4 d r r | r r r e | f1

instead of

c4 d r2 | r2 r4 e | f1

...it's not _that_ bad, but it does look ugly.

If I may take a somehox far-fetched example, think about those
every-day MS Word users who compulsively press their spacebar or Tab
key to get the indent they want, instead of using rulers; they have to
put *exactly* the same number of spaces each time they start a new
paragraph, etc, though LaTeX for instance could solve their problem
quite easily (in LaTeX, no matter how spaces you put, you get
automatically the best result you could hope).

To my mind, LilyPond should be able to automatically "group" rests, to
prevent lazy users to get incorrect typographies such as:

c4 r r r |
or
c4 r8 r r r r r |
or
c4 r2 r4 |
or even
c4 r2. |  %(though I don't know if this could be accepted)
instead of
c4 r r2 |  %(which is, I think, the only way this should be printed)

What do you think about this behavior (which, by the way, could extend
Arvid's proposal, and which I am myself willing to sponsor too)?

Regards,
Valentin Villenave.