Re: MultiMeasureRest symbol spacing

[David Nalesnik]

On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 5:32 PM, David Nalesnik <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Jan-Peter!
>
> On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 2:46 PM, Jan-Peter Voigt <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hi David,
>>
>> happy new year!
>> I do understand the concerns about this matter. Most instrumental parts
>> shouldn't have this problem, as the measures will be spaced well. And in
>> most cases spreaded church rests probably indicate bad spacing or
>> line-breaking.
>>
>> But still - in my opinion - an option to set a maximum distance would serve
>> for cases I am facing right now, where long church rests are followed by one
>> measure of cues which indicate the end of a recitative and display the last
>> notes and words. You will not find such cues very often, but whenever I
>> prepare parts like that I receive thanks from the musicians. In the attached
>> image your patch prevents spreading the 6-measure-rest. Perhaps an optional
>> maximum would be acceptable.
>>
>
> It should.  In this case (I project that) you would do an override like this:
>
> \override MultiMeasureRest.max-symbol-separation = 2
>
> That would make 2 staff-spaces the effective distance in your example,
> because obviously LilyPond would want to make the distance much
> greater.
>
> (In fact, with a value like 2, you'd probably get a uniform spacing
> throughout the document, since it's probably rare that default spacing
> would be less than that.)
>
> Setting the value to something like 6 would allow the distance to vary
> with shorter measures of different sizes, but would cap the spread to
> 6 so the rest would still be legible when spacing is loose.
>


OK, a new patch set is up.  It implements max-symbol-separation as
described above.

I've created a default max of 8.0 staff-spaces, so there is still some
variability in ordinary measures.  If somebody has a better number,
I'm all for it.  (In any case, it's easily overridden, and the default
value will be displayed on the IR page.)

Best,
David