[Lilypond-auto] Issue 2450 in lilypond: horizontal spacing should be uniform regardless of Lyrics

[lilypond]

Status: Accepted
Owner: address@hidden
Labels: Type-Ugly GSoC-LyricProject

New issue 2450 by address@hidden: horizontal spacing should be  
uniform regardless of Lyrics
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2450

Current Lily behavior is to calculate horizontal spacing of notes as if  
there were no Lyrics, and then stretch places where there's not enough  
space.  This results in serious inconsistencies in spacing (especially when  
there are lots of long syllabes, in particular on short note durations).

I suggest a following solution: calculate how long lyric syllabes are  
compared to the theoretical widths of their respective notes (using base  
shortest duration) and adjusting base shortest duration so that average  
syllabe/notehead ratio is close to 1 (either for the whole SpacingSection,  
or that particular system, or at least measure).

Example:

\relative f' { \repeat unfold 8 a4 }
\addlyrics { \repeat unfold 4 la \repeat unfold 4 straight }

the common shortest duration is a quarter note and it would be 3  
staffspaces wide by default (that is, the distance between centers of  
consecutive noteheads would be 3 ss).  Four lyric syllabes are short and  
fit the default spacing perfectly, while another four have a length of 9  
staffspaces - 3 times more than the width of the notes they're attached  
to.  Therefore, average syllabe_length/note_width ratio is 2.  Thus, the  
default note spacing should be changed to be 2 times wider, as in the  
suggested image - it is still necessary to stretch horizontal spacing in  
some places, but not that much.

This issue is a part of the Lyrics Project.  See related entries:
issue 2450
issue 2451
issue 2452
issue 2453
issue 2454
issue 2455
issue 2456
issue 2457
issue 2458
issue 2459
issue 2460
issue 2461
issue 2462

Attachments:
        even spacing.png  23.7 KB