Re: \textLengthOn - choosing which note to lengthen

[Carl D. Sorensen]

On 8/15/08 11:08 AM, "Kieren MacMillan" <address@hidden>
wrote:

> Hi Carl (et al.):
>
>> The effect of \textLengthOn is to make the first musical moment
>> take as much horizontal space as the markup.
>
> Okay, this brings up a question I've had for a whileS
>
> In multi-instrument scores, I would like to avoid collisions in my
> markups (especially metronome markings) < see snippet, below. What
> I'd like to do is have Lilypond automatically stretch measures (if
> necessary) to avoid such collisions, like I've done (manually) in the
> second \score block.
>
> Does anyone know a way of doing that? The problem with \textLengthOn
> (or equivalent things) is that the *first* measure (moment) *ONLY* is
> stretched, which results in ugly scores (parts).
>

I'm sorry, Kieren, but I couldn't get this done right now.

It seems to me that to do this there needs to be an equivalent of
\textLengthOn for TextSpanners.  What you're after is the objective of
having a musical interval have a length at least as long as your markup.
And musical intervals (as opposed to musical moments) are the domain of
spanners.

Just for kicks, I tried using TextSpanners to accomplish your desired
outcome; it looked just like your original without markups.

TextSpanners do have a minimum-length property, which could be set to the
length of the text.   I'm sure that somebody with a bit more experience in
LilyPond than me can figure out how to handle the callbacks as necessary.

Based on looking at the Internals Reference, I'm sure it can be done
with TextSpanners, but I couldn't figure out how to do it.

Thanks,

Carl