Re: Dialogue text automatically spanning over multiple lines/pages

[David Kastrup]

Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Yannick,
>
>> I would like to have a way to tell Lilypond : "Say this over measures
>> 1 to 10" (some long text) then "say this over measure 12 and 13".
>> 
>> Is there such a functionality, or some trick to achieve it ?
>
> No simple way to do it currently, as far as I know.
>
> I have been offering to sponsor such a function for a couple of years,
> as it would be invaluable to the engravings of my music dramas
> (chamber operas, musicals, etc.). No luck to date.
>
> But now that spanners with multiple texts have been [totally? almost
> totally?] worked out, perhaps what we want can finally be done fairly
> easily. David Nalesnik or David Kastrup (explicitly cc’ed here) would
> know better than I…

I have some branch with a "Wait_iterator" in my repository but I don't
think it was all that useful for some reason.  Don't remember what it
was waiting for, though.

Ah, the respective music function was

+waitFor =
+#(define-music-function (music) (ly:music?)
+   (_i "Wait for the occurence of the given @var{music} in the
+current context.  Use it, for example, as
address@hidden
+\\context Score \\waitFor \\mark "A"
address@hidden example
+")
+   (make-music 'WaitMusic
+               'element music))
+

so it would have been unsuitable for waiting for a particular measure.
I don't really know whether the corresponding C code works but I
probably canned this when realizing that it did not really lend itself
to a number of applications you wanted it for.

One would probably need to come up with a better way of specifying the
event to wait for than just some music expression.

-- 
David Kastrup