RE: Aligning relative to page - Use OOoLilyPond

[Paul Harouff]

Valentin,

I'm not trying to start an email flame war. But it really bothers me when
programmers get condescending with users, implying that we are stupid if we
can't understand the documentation, or if we don't have all hundreds of
pages of snippets using complex overrides and Scheme tweaks memorized.

The problem with the LilyPond documentation is that users have to understand
Scheme in order to understand LilyPond. A programming language should be
completely self contained. My impression is that about 30-40% of all of the
examples in the documentation include Scheme code to make the LilyPond code
work. 

I still haven't figured out when plain "text" quotes are adequate for a
command, and when #"text" scheme contants are needed for a command. And what
the heck does a #' mean with some of the commands? In other words, reading
the documentation, I can't figure out which commands are LilyPond commands
and which are Scheme commands. There are pages and pages of context and
variable names without a clue as to what they mean or how a user
off-the-street is supposed to change their values.

I guess you could say I have a love-hate relationship with LilyPond. I love
the parts that are intuitively obvious and I hate the parts that I can't
figure out without wasting days of trial and error.

> Here is the snippet I added:
> http://lsr.dsi.unimi.it/LSR/Item?id=300

Your LSR explanation incorrectly implies that \fill-line is equivalent to
center. 

The correct explanation is that \fill-line equally spaces all of the text
objects in the list across the width of the page. If there is only one
object, then the behavior of \fill-line results in it being centered.

\fill-line {The quick brown fox}
results in something like:

The              quick                      brown                   fox

\fill-line {"The quick brown fox"}
results in something like:

                        The quick brown fox

Whereas,
\center-align {The quick brown fox}
results in something like:

 The
quick
brown 
 fox

and
\center-align {"The quick brown fox"}
results in something like:

brown fox

Put yourself in the shoes of a new user trying to center a line of text who
has already tried center-align. On his own, searching the documentation, he
would never intuitively figure out that the command \fill-line is what he is
looking for. 

Now imagine that new user trying to program something like:


                                        SMALL LITANY

Deacon: Again and again, in peace, let us pray to the Lord.
\score { MUSIC FOR "Choir: Lord have mercy" }

Deacon: Help us, save us, have mercy on us, and keep us,
                O God, by Thy grace.
\score { MUSIC FOR "Choir: Lord have mercy" }

Deacon: Commemorating or most holy, most pure, most blessed
                and glorious lady, Theotokos, and ever-virgin Mary
                with all the saints, let us commend ourselves and each
                other, and all our life unto Christ our God.
\score { MUSIC FOR "Choir: To Thee, O Lord." }

Priest: For Thou art a good God and lovest mankind, and unto
                Thee we ascribe glory: to the Father, and to the Son,
                and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages.
\score { MUSIC FOR "Choir: Amen" }

                        THIRD ANTIPHON - TROPARIA ON BEATITUDES
                                                MODE 3

\score { MUSIC FOR VERSE "1. In Thy kingdom remember us O Lord, when 
                Thou comest into Thy kingdom. Blessed are the poor in spirit
                for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." }
Reader: 1. He Who in ancient times by divine gesture gathered the
                water into a single mass and parted the sae for the people
                of Israel, even He is our God, exceedingly glorious; to
                Him alone do we sing, for He has been glorified.

\score { MUSIC FOR VERSE "2. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall
                be comforted." }
Reader: 2. Second troparion.

\score { MUSIC FOR VERSE "3. Blessed are the meek ..." }
Reader: 3. Third troparion.


And, I confess that my solution a few months ago was to use \hspace to brute
force put the text where I wanted it by trial and error. This was a pain but
solved my problem at the time. What really frustrated me was the vertical
spacing issues which are perfectly illustrated in Valentin's LSR snippet. A
\markup always gravitates closer to the score after it, which makes
formatting  the twelve verses of my sample third antiphon above nearly
impossible.  

I gave up trying to understand the \markup documentation when I discovered I
could use OOoLilyPond to create png score snippets for each hymn that I
could paste into MS Word documents containing the text of the church
service. Then I have complete WYSIWYG control over the page layout. For pure
production, this is by far the fastest solution I have found to get work
done.

Note: swriter gets really unstable when you have a lot of OOoLilyPond
snippets (I had 2 crashes on two separate documents in one week), or I would
not have needed to use MS Word. Once you get the OOoLilyPond template
correctly set up for your project, the swriter user interface is actually
pretty good. If there was a way to combine the jEdit editor with the
OOoLilyPond popup window inside swriter, I would be in heaven.

Paul