Re: multiple TextSpanners per voice

[Trevor Bača]

Hi,

I'd like to add that I'm *incredibly* excited by this work. The ability to have multiple text spanners in a voice -- and to tweak each independently -- is something I've wanted in LilyPond for many years. (I responded to a different thread about this a touch too early only moments ago; apologies, catching up on list mail.) This is really incredibly exciting to me, and I think it will be to very many other composers once the ability is made clear in a public release (and in the docs).

For what it's worth, I'd very much like to request the promotion of this work to a fully acknowledged new feature (respecting, of course, the needs of feature sequencing in the release process).

I'm not quite sure what the best (user) interface for this is. I suppose \startTextSpan[One|Two|Three|Four] will work. Though it seems like \startTextSpan #1 or \startTextSpan #"fancy-spanner-name" would be a more complete generalization of the feature.

Regardless of the user interface, this work is important. Please consider elevating the change to a full feature (with a NEWS entry and a graphic example or two) with user syntax that is as streamlined and clear as possible. I think we will be surprised at the amount of uptake among many composers.

Thanks so much for this, David.

Trevor.

On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 10:09 AM, David Nalesnik <address@hidden> wrote:

Ok, this should do it.

The intention is to provide extra functionality to text spanners.  By using this code, you have all the functionality of normal text spanners, but you are able to have multiple spanners per voice.

You simply need to swap the regular engraver for this one in a layout block, and use the commands I've defined: \startTextSpanOne, and the like.  (You can change the names, of course, and add more.  This is crying out for a better interface, I know,)

Regarding difficulties mentioned earlier in the thread: 

The spanners should nest properly and maintain their orientation across line breaks.  Here this is achieved by assigning minute variations of outside-staff-priority behind the scenes.  (Turns out you can use outside-staff-priorities like 350.0001 ....) You can still override and tweak outside-staff-priority of TextSpanner if you want.

I believe that this manipulation may be avoided by inventing a new alignment grob "to bind them all." but I'm not sure.  Since the attached seems sufficient, this could wait until time came (if ever) to add this to the code base.

DN

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Trevor Bača

www.trevorbaca.com