For jazz lead sheets, I frequently want to place a coda at the beginning of a line following a \break, centered over the barline (which may be implied unless the line begins with a repeat barline). I use manual breaks to force four bars to the line for readability. Getting the coda glyph in the right place has been difficult throughout my use of Lilypond.
With a manual line break, \codaMark insists on placing the coda glyph at the end of the bar- which works well when the reader is being referred to a coda down the page. However, when placing the glyph at the start of the coda itself on a new line following a \break, \codaMark places it at the end of the previous line. This is visually confusing. My solution has been to just write the coda mark in by hand on all the charts in order to have it in the logical place. If I don’t use \break, it’s less of an issue but then I end up with odd numbers of bars on some lines, reducing the regularity and readability of the chart. Using \coda instead of \codaMark places the glyph above the first beat of the bar instead of the barline, which is often tolerable but it forces chord names and tuplet brackets vertically up and away from the staff, looking weird. The workaround is the same- omit it and write it in by hand on the paper. This is not useable when dealing with musicians using tablets instead of sheafs of paper, as is now normal in the 21st century, so I’d like to figure out how to get it done in Lilypond. There is probably- as usual- some simple and basic concept I am not understanding (as a musician with very little background in computer languages). Thanks!
