Hello,
How can I increase the distance between the last note of a measure and the following bar line?
Hi,
Back in 2021 this question lead to an extensive discussion about how the information architecture of the IR might be optimized.
I'd like to re-up this discussion now (at the end of 2024) and say how effective I thought so many of the suggestions in that thread were.
Most helpful of all was the suggestion that the grob descriptions given as IR 3.1 ...
... be expanded to list *all* properties for a given grob, rather than only the properties that a grob *changes* from interface defaults.
This is such a great idea. When I teach LilyPond in the classroom, I am always surprised to re-discover how much time users spend clicking back and forth between a grob's description in IR 3.1 and the (potentially many) interfaces hyperlinked at the bottom of the page. As many people noted back in the original thread in 2021, the current information architecture of IR 3.1 induces a type of hub-and-spoke / hunt-and-peck interaction pattern on readers of the documentation: this changes the experience of what should be *reading about* a grob (here are the properties: which ones do I need?) to an experience of *guessing whether* information about a grob is even available at all (maybe if I just click on one more interface ...).
The Internals Reference contains a huge wealth of information useful for achieving truly professional typography with LilyPond. But decades into LilyPond's development, navigating the IR to find what one needs is still shockingly more difficult than it should be, as reported by truly every single new user of the system I've observed in the classroom. Listing *all* properties for a given grob -- where all means all -- in IR 3.1 would be a tremendous step towards helping users find what they need. (Other suggestions from the original thread were also excellent: making property defaults crystal clear, for example. But I'd like to suggest that the #1 priority for any restructuring of the information architecture at IR 3.1 be listing all properties for each grob on a single page, as a way of helping define success if the work is ever taken up.)
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