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