Re: Horizontal positioning of rests

[Simon Albrecht]

On 01.09.2016 22:49, Karen Billings wrote:
> Sorry to bother you with a beginner's problem... I have been using 
> Lilypond for about a year now, and all that time I have had problems 
> with rest positioning. I've been dealing with it, but it's becoming 
> more of a problem now that trying to read multi-line scores...
>
> The documentation states that rests are, by default, always centered 
> horizontally.  For some reason, mine always end up left-justified. 
>  What am I doing wrong and how can I correct it?

Short answer: use R instead of r.
Long answer: in LilyPond, there are two different grobs for rests, Rest 
and MultiMeasureRest. The former is typeset once and aligned with the 
timestep where it begins, the latter is typeset centered once in every 
bar it spans. E.g.
{ \time 2/4 R2*5 }
contains only one multi-measure rest with a duration of five 2/4 
measures which is printed five times. Thus it is possible to compress them:
{ \compressFullBarRests R1*7 }
will print the MMR only once.
(In recent development versions, this command has been renamed to 
\compressMMRests.)

HTH, Simon