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Re: docs about Rest vertical position


From: Mats Bengtsson
Subject: Re: docs about Rest vertical position
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 2022 12:44:58 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/91.11.0


On 2022-09-02 16:43, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
A little more context:

   “To explicitly specify a rest’s vertical position, write a note followed by \rest.”
While this is a useful thing to know about, I don't personally believe it's a best practice: it mixes content with presentation, it doesn't play well with \transpose, etc.
Consider, for example, the following two snippets:

\transpose c f \voices 1,2 <<
  { \tweak Y-offset 1 r8 b e' d' }
  \\
  { g16^1 f^2 g a }

        
\transpose c f \voices 1,2 <<
  { c''8\rest b e' d' }
  \\
  { g16^1 f^2 g a }

        

What I miss in the discussion here is the user interface aspect and the ease of use. At least for a less experienced LilyPond user, the c''8\rest has a very intuitive meaning of "a rest placed where you would place the c''", whereas \tweak as a general concept requires much more higher level of LilyPond competence and even if you do pattern matching, you have to figure out what the argument 1 means, what the unit is and if positive or negative values are up or down.

If I'm not completely mistaken, the original reason to introduce the \rest syntax was to avoid having to use
\override Rest.staff-position = #3 r8
which was the standard solution recommended at that time (this was long before \tweak and \once was invented), and which required figuring out what numeric value of staff position corresponded to the desired vertical position (which conceptually is more demanding than specifying a pitch).

As has already been discussed, there are both pros and cons of letting the rest vertical position follow a possible transposition and there may be situations where tweaking staff-position may  be better suited than Y-offset (which is relative to the position that LilyPond thinks is the best, depending on Voice settings and possible collision avoidance).

So, I'm not entirely positive to the proposal.

    /Mats


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