Re: \lyrics, was Re: Vertical spacing of figured bass

[David Wright]

On Mon 06 Nov 2017 at 09:10:54 (+0100), David Kastrup wrote:
> David Wright <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > On Sun 05 Nov 2017 at 19:29:27 (+0100), David Kastrup wrote:
> >
> >> It's very thinly documented since it just confuses people.  As you
> >> can see.
> >
> > Well it would do if they don't find it in the documentation as
> > they have to either guess or look for places where it's used
> > correctly, as opposed to p142 of the LM where it does appear
> > to be a mistake.
> >
> >> At one time it was entirely undocumented even I think.
> >
> > Intentionally?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> >> > so I thought I'd look it up. It took a while to find it in the NR
> >> > as it's rather hidden away under §5.4 (and with no index entry).
> >> 
> >> Intentionally I think.
> >
> > That seems ridiculous. Many posts here are greeted with responses like
> > "Why didn't you look it up." Perhaps the answer lies here.
> 
> I have to see yet any post where someone unwittingly used \lyrics and
> the answer was "why didn't you look it up".

That's not what I said.

> Part of the reason is that
> we don't even document it, and there were long discussions about
> removing it and its ilk altogether.

That's no reason for not documenting it, resulting in people who
come across it elsewhere wasting their time looking for it.

The conventional way for dealing with features like this is to
document it as "deprecated, may be withdrawn in a future version",
or like the attached.

> > I don't have enough background information to know whether the
> > introduction of "\lyrics" was to improve consistency with its
> > friends, or just for brevity (popular in the unix world).
> 
> Neither.  It was there before the exposure of contexts and modes was
> formalized.  It was just \lyrics, \chords, \figures, \notes then.

Cheers,
David.

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