Hi Graham,
2.11.15 was the release that introduced a bunch of new spanner stuff.
I was just going through my mail from Jan / Feb this year (when
Han-Wen was working on the implementation) trying to find an answer to
Risto's question of whether or not 'to-barline should work correctly
with trill spanners. I haven't, unfortunately, been able to produce a
definitive answer to Risto's question; *but*, I did discover a new
spanner-related music function that has somehow escaped announcement
and documentation.
I describe the behavior below and then suggest a small doc addition to
8.1.2 "Text Spanners" at the end of this mail.
There's a new music function called \endSpanners. The list of music
functions in the music function appendix gives no documentation for
this function (together with a FIXME), but I can provide an
explanation here. \endSpanners makes it possible to issue a
\startTextSpan *without* a matching \stopTextSpan. For example ...
\new Staff {
c'1 \startTextSpan c'1
}
... is syntactically incorrect -- no \stopTextSpan appears and so lily
issues the following warning ...
warning: unterminated text spanner
c'1
\startTextSpan c'1
But when we include the command \endSpanners ...
\new Staff {
\endSpanners
c'1 \startTextSpan c'1
}
... the example is now completely grammatical and interprets just fine.
The command also works for crescendi and decrescendi ...
\new Staff {
\endSpanners
c'1 \< c'1
}
... where, for example, we see that we need no closing \! to terminate
the crescendo.
The purpose of \endSpanners is not to encourage potentially confusing
input (where start-commands match no closing stop-commands) but rather
to allow for quick and easy input of successive spanners (and
hairpins) all of which terminate *at the very next note*.
So that's a brief explanation of the function. Could you please insert
the following at the very bottom of 8.1.2 "Text and line spanners",
immediately before the "see also"?
%%% BEGIN DOC ADDITION %%%
The music function \endSpanners terminates spanners and hairpins after
exactly one note.
\new Staff {
\endSpanners
c'2 \startTextSpan c'2
c'2 \< c'2
}
When using \endSpanners it is not necessary to close \startTextSpan
with \stopTextSpan, nor is it necessary to close hairpins with \!.
%%% END DOC ADDITION %%%
One thing I realize now writing this update is that I don't know if
there is a way to turn \endSpanners *off* at some point in input and
return to specifying spanner (and hairpin) endpoints manually.
If anyone knows of a way to turn \endSpanners off, please reply back
so I can stick that in the docs, too.
Trevor.
--
Trevor Bača
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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