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Re: Possible bug in lyrics mode


From: Urs Liska
Subject: Re: Possible bug in lyrics mode
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:50:49 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.1.10) Gecko/20100512 Lightning/1.0b1 Thunderbird/3.0.5

FYI: Added to the issue tracker: http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1188
Best
Urs

Am 13.07.2010 16:48, schrieb Arle Lommel:
Hi all,

Just thought I'd mention something I believe to be a bug in lyrics mode, but thought I'd ask if there is a rationale for it before I submit.

I found this a few weeks ago and got a workaround thanks to the list, but it was a bit of a pain and I can't help but think this is a bug.

Line height for lyrics (at least in 2.13.24) is determined by the postscript bounding box for the characters in the line (or at least that's what it seems), *not* the em-square, which is the basic unit for almost all typographic measurements. This means that if a line has no descenders (j, p, or y), it loses height at the bottom and the next line will sit closer to it that it would if that line contained descenders. Similarly, if the line contains no ascenders (which is, admittedly, unlikely, but certainly not impossible), the spacing between lines is figured from the x-height of the text rather than the cap height. As a result the visual spacing between lines can be very uneven, with some lines closer to each other than to other ones and very irregular appearance.

The following image shows the problem. The dotted red lines show even spacing, but you can see that Lilypond’s output is nowhere near even. The problem is the third line, which lacks descenders, thus forcing the fourth line to sit too close to it:

  
I would argue that the layout engine should work based on the em-square of the font, which would result in consistent and predictable spacing. The way it is in 2.13.24 though is essentially unpredictable since you can’t know what the output is unless you know in advance what the lyrics text will be. Before I file it as a bug, though, I would like to know if there is a reason to base the line height on the postscript bounding boxes of the text. -Arle
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