Re: A small but vexing problem (fermatas in several voices)

[Alexander Kobel]

On 2010-12-30 22:44, Michael J. O'Donnell wrote:
> Annoyance: the expressive part needs skips of the durations
> corresponding to the notes in between the expressive marks. Someday, I
> hope that LilyPond will have the facility to mark temporal points in
> various parts so that they can be aligned without counting out the beats
> correctly in each one. This would be structurally analogous to the use
> of TABs in a single line of typed material, but it would not be
> associated with lines of music, rather with entire scores.

This idea of defining "anchors" or "targets" in the music is a
long-standing [*], much-awaited request for enhancement.  See
<http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=824>, and be sure to
check out Gilles' workaround (comment #2).  I never tested Gilles' code,
though, and I'm not sure whether it will work in the upcoming 2.14.

[*] I think this idea is much older than the report filed in the tracker.

Unfortunately IIUC this amounts to a quite invasive change in the whole
LilyPond structure of parsing and handling input, and is unlikely to
appear in the not-so-near future.  Especially since it does not increase
overall functionality or output quality, and it's easy to overcome for
freshly written LilyPond scores with reasonably clever variable definitions.


Cheers,
Alexander