How to move noteheads to the left? (was: Re: How to add double barlines to a gregorian chant?)

[Dominic Neumann]

2008/7/31 Dominic Neumann <address@hidden>:
> 2008/7/30 Joseph Haig <address@hidden>:
>> An even more
>> unfortunate side effect of this is that if you have long melimata the
>> spacing gets messed up, because lilypond allocates a certain amount of
>> space for each neume even though they are clustered together.  You can
>> see this in your example, where the notes above 'unheil' have too much
>> space between them.
>
> That´s really ugly and I hope to find a way to solve it. Without that
> problem the chant results are considerable - maybe because I don´t
> have difficult constructs to typeset. Unaesthetic source code is
> annoying, but unaesthetic output is unacceptable ...
>

As I have to complete some chants in the next days, I am willing to
work with some tweaks to solve this, because I cannot wait for the
time when LilyPond will do it itself. By now, I´m only able to move
the lyrics to better positioned under a melismata. I only set \once
\override LyricText #'X-offset = #-1 before the corresponding syllable
and this works quite good. But moving the next notehead to left isn´t
possible by now.

I tried to set \once \override NoteHead #'X-offset = #-1 before the
note being printed after the melisma, but it only takes effect if you
give positive values to it. The the offset gets bigger, but giving
negative values doesn´t change anything.
\once \override NoteColumn #'force-hshift = #5 obviously only works in
polyphonic contexts, not here.

What can I do?

Dominic