Re: outside-staff-priority with slur and hairpin

[Trevor Daniels]

Jonathan Wilkes wrote Friday, September 18, 2009 7:12 PM

> --- On Fri, 9/18/09, Trevor Daniels <address@hidden> wrote:
> > The difficulty is that there is no general rule that can be
> > used to discover
> > which properties have an effect on a particular grob and
> > which do not.
> > In this case one has to know that hairpins are spanners
> > (because they
> > start and end at different musical moments), and spanners
> > are positioned
> > by the appropriate spanner object.
>
> I think this is the most difficult part of using Lilypond that 
> I've
> come up against.  Currently I'm using the IR as a kind of "quick
> reference" manual- if I need to tweak something like how long a 
> hairpin
> should be, I just go to Hairpin and find what seems like the right
> property.  But as your explanation (and others on this list) point 
> to,
> there's a lot more to take into consideration to get the right
> property (e.g., 'font-size vs. 'zigzag-width for the width of the 
> trill continuation glyph).

Most of the time your approach will work, which is why I
chose to outline it in the Learning Manual, but there are a
number of situations where it breaks down.  Fortunately
these tend to arise only when tackling fairly esoteric typesetting
problems, so only the more experienced users are affected by
them.  But some of them, like using DynamicLineSpanner, are
more common, and these should be covered in the Learning
Manual, IMO.  BTW, I've added a new para to the LM to avoid
the particular problem you encountered.  It should appear in
the docs to 2.13.4.  And I intend to add an intro to spanners too,
but that might miss the next release as it will take a little 
longer.

Trevor