RE: Coda

[Philip Thomas]

Eluze <address@hidden> wrote:

>> please be aware that the <>-\markup will only work in later 2.15 versions -
>> you 
can use s1*0 here.

David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

>Huh?  <>-\markup has always worked from the time chord syntax 
has been
>introduced.  The great conflict was just about whether it was a good
>idea to let users know about it.

I 
read parts of the great controversy a while ago, as a comparative beginner, 
with some bemusement. Although a beginner, 
I found the need to hang \markup onto bits of nothing quite a few times, and 
tried using both s1*0 and <>. Maybe it's 
because I'm a singer, but chords don't seem sacrosanct to me, and "<>" looks 
like a less substantial event to my eye 
than does "s1*0". The psychological effect of the more substantial looking "s" 
and "1" isn't somehow rendered nugatory 
by the "0". Also, as a singer, something about "<>" resonates with that 
wonderful piece of Victoriana, Arthur 
Sullivan's "The Lost Chord", which for me, at least, adds a colorful 
meta-emphasis to the insubstantial nature of a 
"<>".

In my own mind (admittedly a quite lonely place, if not downright strange), I 
always mentally call the thing 
that the \markup is hung on a "skyhook" -- a most agreeable kind of device from 
any perspective -- whatever syntax is 
used to invoke it. I tried defining a variable that I acromyously called "sh". 
One could of course retain the 
association of the variable with skyhook, but at the same time add some color 
it, with a stronger allusion to its 
essentially silent nature, by writing it as "shh". I had daydreams about one or 
two letters in the Greek alphabet, not 
to mention the very skyhook-evoking inverted question mark (Unicode 00BF).

In the particular context I was dealing 
with, I ended up wrestling with "define-markup-command" and losing the match 
badly. But I still find "<>" to have more 
intuitive emotional and syntactic appeal than "s1*0". A more neutral symbol 
might be nice though.

Cheers, Philip