Short ottava ambiguity

[Simon Albrecht]

Hello,

as a followup to the ly-user thread on ottavation bracket/fermata 
stacking I noticed the following problem:
By default, OttavaBracket has a minimum-length of 1 and the text is 
right-aligned to the first note in the range of the ottavation. Thus, 
it's sometimes impossible to discern from which note on the ottava is 
supposed to be applied. In short-ottava.ly (see attachment) the ottava 
applies to both notes, in short-ottava-2.ly only to the second note. Yet 
the output is identical.
My search for occurences of this issue in 
<http://imslp.org/wiki/Etudes,_Op.25_%28Chopin,_Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric%29> 
gave the five image examples in the attachment: The Peters (ex1-3), 
Breitkopf and Bote&Bock (ex4) engravings all have only 8 as ottava text, 
which considerably easies the problem, and except for Peters they didn't 
use ottava for a single note in this case I found (see ex1 for Peters' 
ottava on one note [excluding the grace note!] and 4 for the same note 
in Bote&Bock without ottava).
Another possibility I recall from experience is leaving out the bracket 
and placing "8va" centered or left-aligned on the note.
What do the authorities Gould and Ross say?
This is closely related to 
<https://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=3690>, but I 
decided to post it here in order to ask for your opinions and because 
it's not only about alignment.

Best regards,
Simon

short-ottava.ly
Description: Text Data

short-ottava-2.ly
Description: Text Data

short-ottava.png
Description: PNG image

short-ottava-2.png
Description: PNG image

ex1.png
Description: PNG image

ex2.png
Description: PNG image

ex3.png
Description: PNG image

ex4.png
Description: PNG image