Shortening hairpins

[Andrew Bernard]

Recently there was a discussion about this. Now I need to do it. The answers in the discussion, whilst erudite, seem very kludgy, and not appropriate for my score.

Why is there no simple way to shorten a hairpin in lilypond? It’s easy to use shorten-pair to adjust tuplet bracket lengths. Why don’t hairpins follow a similar method?

It was mentioned that the stencil code is in C++. For some time I have been looking for something worthwhile to do in the internals to get to the point where I could contribute something. Is this a candidate? Does the stencil need rewriting in Scheme? I am sure there are other more worthy tasks, but I happen to really need this one at present. Should this discussion be on the lilypond-devel list instead?

So what is the technical reason why this is so difficult? From an end user point of view a hairpin is just an object that should be able to be resized easily.

Andrew