Re: Piano centered dynamics - dealing with bar collisions

[Przemyslaw Pawelczyk]

Hi, Abraham!

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 6:49 PM, Abraham Lee <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 6:02 PM, Przemyslaw Pawelczyk [via Lilypond] <
> address@hidden> wrote:

>> There is a piano centered dynamics template that was present in
>> Lilypond Learning Manual for v2.14, but is not available in recent
>> versions:
>> http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.14/Documentation/learning/piano-templates
>>
>> If we take it (w/o midi part, which is not needed here) and add s1 in
>> everything (i.e. upper, lower, dynamics, pedal) at the beginning, then
>> we can see that \fff overlaps the piano staff bar:
>> http://paste.przemoc.net/lilypond/piano-centered-dynamics/
>>
>> How to make dynamic text not overlap the bar, yet shift the note
>> column (not sure if I'm using the correct term here) appropriately, so
>> the text would remain centered?
>>
>> (This mostly works when \dynamics are put into particular Staff [only
>> mostly, because \fff remains then too close to the bar, almost
>> touching it], but I want to have one \dynamics in separate Dynamics
>> between upper and lower Staff within PianoStaff.)
>>
>> My half-workaround is setting DynamicText.X-offset (which in this
>> particular example seems ok with value -0.3, but it doesn't work that
>> well in general), but then DynamicText stops being centered and
>> depending on width of the dynamic text, it may be almost unnoticeable
>> or looks awfully wrong.
>>
>> I hope there are some better solutions.
>>
>
> I, too, have been trying to figure this one out and it appears that we now
> have a solution (though it appears to not be documented in the IR, for some
> reason--CC-ing the bug-list). It turns out that all you need to add the
> following to the appropriate context (Dynamics, in your case):
>
> \override DynamicText.extra-spacing-height = #'(-inf.0 . +inf.0)

Yeah, it works now like when \dynamics are put in Staff. Great!
This is the magic sauce to "glue" dynamic text in Dynamics with the
notes in Staff.

>
> That should get you on your way! I've always been puzzled that
> extra-spacing-width doesn't change this at all (maybe I just don't know how
> to use it properly). The LyricText grob does this SpanBar collision
> avoidance by default, so I was confused as to why DynamicText couldn't do
> the same.

>From my tests it looks that changing DynamicText.extra-spacing-width
normally works only when dynamics are put on Staff, not if they are on
their separate Dynamics.
But thanks to "glueing" (i.e. using above mentioned infinite
extra-spacing-height trick), extra-spacing-width works too!
So now I can also fix dynamic text touching the bar:

    \override DynamicText.extra-spacing-width = #'(-0.2 . 0.2)

Here is the PDF with both overrides:
http://paste.przemoc.net/lilypond/piano-centered-dynamics/piano-centered-dynamics-workaround.pdf

>
> BTW, this does NOT work with 2.18.2, but it does with 2.19.35 at least.
> Haven't checked the other devel versions.

I usually try to use the latest Lilypond available, but good to know
that such "glueing" is moderately recent feature.

>
> Anyway. There you go.

Thank you very much!

Regards.

-- 
Przemyslaw Pawelczyk
Cross-site thinker, rookie composer, Linux apprentice
https://soundcloud.com/przemoc86