Magnetic snapping of syllables and hyphenating long words

[Janne Uusitalo]

Hi,

I haven’t been on this list for quite some time, so I tried my best to
scan the archives for previous contributions to the topic. Sorry if I
missed something, but here’s what I gathered:

• In December 2013 [1], David and Kieren wrote a piece of code to
prevent small gaps from appearing between syllables that are too close
for hyphens. In March 2014 [2], David posted an improved version of
it, complete with examples.
• In September 2014 [3], Simon reported a bug in the engraver,
describing how it breaks the hyphenation of long words that span
across two systems. David responded [4] with a fix ("a simple change
from the > operator to >=  in a function").
• In February 2015 [5], Simon reported a regression between versions
2.19.8 and 2.19.15, which David also had a solution to [6]. (I’m
running 2.18.2, so this part isn’t relevant to the following, but I’m
including it in case it helps someone else.)

For me at least, the fix in [4] causes the original gap problem to
reappear. I’m attaching a minimal test example and the results of it
when using > (test1, no gaps but hyphenation broken) or >= (test2,
hyphenation works but there are gaps) on line 171 of lyric-word.ily.
(In my current project, I’m using the more recent version from [5] but
the outcome is the same.)

This topic was also discussed in
https://code.google.com/archive/p/lilypond/issues/2458 where Janek
(Happy Bird) concluded, in July 2015: "needs_work". Has any work that
I’m unaware of been done since?

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2013-12/msg00425.html
[2] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2014-03/msg00489.html
[3] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2014-09/msg00047.html
[4] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2014-09/msg00124.html
[5] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2015-02/msg00742.html
[6] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2015-02/msg00745.html

Kind regards,
Janne