Re: Odd vertical spacing of lyrics

[Keith OHara]

James Bailey <derhindemith <at> googlemail.com> writes:

> [off-topic rant]
> ...
> [/off-topic rant]

That was quite topical, for an 'off-topic' rant.
You have to tell us how you prefer to enter the lyrics when
they are sometimes shared.  Is there one Lyrics for alto, 
one for alto-tenor-together, and one for tenor? or do you
just have alto and tenor and put skips in the tenor when they
are together?  is there an alignAboveContext involved?

The old LilyPond collapsed everything in each system to take
only the vertical space needed.  For lyrics, it seems that did
pretty much the right thing. The new LilyPond will spread things
vertically to use the space available, which reveals her 
ignorance in how things are supposed to be attached.

Lilypond lets us associate lyrics (for timing purposes, \lyricsto)
to any voice anywhere, so to have her know whether they should go
close to the next staff up or down seems to require a search for
which Staff contains the associate Voice. Another approach would
be to put a staff-affinity=#CENTER marker at the top and bottom
of each system, so the bit of code producing that warning "staff-
affinities should only decrease" would ensure that Lyrics have
'affinity' pointing to something within their own system.

I have been meaning to work on that centering-lyrics snippet
(and will not be hurt if somebody else steals the job) to try
to boil down the complicated overrides into a small useful set
of predefines, so we can just say: \lyricAttachDown or 
\lyricsCenter or \lyricsCollapse and remain blissfully ignorant
of the complexity underneath.