Re: Horizontal spacing bug?

[Aaron Hill]

On 2019-10-03 8:53 am, Andrew Bernard wrote:
> Lilypond is
> heavily biased to Common Era music, and that's well and good and where 
> it
> excels, but I think with the amount of contemporary modernist music 
> being
> written people could be a bit more open to more contemporary 
> techniques.

How standardized is this so-called "modernist" music?  I have to confess 
inexperience with the genre, but it sounds like composers are tackling 
the challenges of such complex music in potentially very different ways. 
 And that would make it very difficult for LilyPond to support in an 
official and authoritative manner.  At the very least, I can see why 
there would be a bias toward Common Era music that is more-or-less fixed 
in stone by this point in time.

One solution would seem to involve increasing the modularity of 
LilyPond, to enable folks to author their own versions of the underlying 
systems.  In this way, an alternative layout/spacing engine would be 
able to provide truly strict proportional alignment of grobs given 
whatever constraints are useful to modern composers.  But such added 
modularity greatly increases the complexities of managing compatibility 
with other systems.  Imagine all of the snippets we have so far and how 
they might be making assumptions on internal mechanisms.

It might make sense to fork LilyPond and work on replacing components 
specifically for modern music.  In this way, there is no risk to 
breaking anything in the main distribution.  And once the new branch 
succeeds in meeting the goals of modern composers, then one could 
consider how best to merge the results into a unified, but more 
flexible, LilyPond.


-- Aaron Hill