Re: What to do when \> and \< produce text

[Brett Duncan]

Valentin Villenave wrote:
> Use the Source, Luke...
>
> ly/spanners-init.ly, line 21:
>
> cresc =  {
>    #(ly:export (make-event-chord (list cr)))
>    \set crescendoText = \markup { \italic "cresc." }
>    \set crescendoSpanner = #'text
> }

Okay, that makes things clearer (for me, at least).

> I don't know why George used \cresc in the first place though.

A good question - maybe George can answer. However, it should be noted 
that in the Internals Reference under 1.1.17 CrescendoEvent it says:

...
Syntax: note\cr … note\rc
You can also use \<, \!, \cresc, and \endcresc. See the Notation 
Reference for details.
...

IMHO, that reads as though \cr, \< and \cresc are just synonyms for the 
same command. But clearly \cresc is not the same as \<. So the IR needs 
to be corrected.

Mats Bengtsson wrote:
> The \cresc macro is defined in ly/spanners-init.ly and is preceded by a comment:
>
> % STOP: junkme!
>
> so it's clearly not well-supported It's certainly intended to generate a text style 
> crescendo "cresc.".
> However, at the time the macro was implemented, any setting of crescendoText 
> was automatically
> reverted after the next crescendo event (i.e. it worked like a \once \set ...) 
> so now that the crescendoText
> property works just as all other properties, it would make more sense to let 
> the macro be implemented as
>
> cresc =  {
>  #(ly:export (make-event-chord (list cr)))
>  \once \set crescendoText = \markup { \italic "cresc." }
>  \once \set crescendoSpanner = #'text
> }
>
> if we want it to remain. In contrast to using the supported and documented 
> macro \crescTextCresc,
> you don't get any dashed line when using \cresc. Note also that there is a 
> macro \endcresc that reverts
> the settings done by \cresc (which wouldn't be needed if we used the above definition). 

Given that what \cresc currently does can also be achieved with

  \override DynamicTextSpanner #'dash-period = #-1.0
  \crescTextCresc\

as clearly shown in Notation Reference 1.3.1, it there really a need to 
keep it? I can't say that I've seen many instances of the text "cresc." 
without the dashed line, but perhaps others have.

Brett