Re: MultiMeasureRest symbol spacing

[David Nalesnik]

Hi Jan-Peter!

On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 2:46 PM, Jan-Peter Voigt <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> happy new year!
> I do understand the concerns about this matter. Most instrumental parts
> shouldn't have this problem, as the measures will be spaced well. And in
> most cases spreaded church rests probably indicate bad spacing or
> line-breaking.
>
> But still - in my opinion - an option to set a maximum distance would serve
> for cases I am facing right now, where long church rests are followed by one
> measure of cues which indicate the end of a recitative and display the last
> notes and words. You will not find such cues very often, but whenever I
> prepare parts like that I receive thanks from the musicians. In the attached
> image your patch prevents spreading the 6-measure-rest. Perhaps an optional
> maximum would be acceptable.
>

It should.  In this case (I project that) you would do an override like this:

\override MultiMeasureRest.max-symbol-separation = 2

That would make 2 staff-spaces the effective distance in your example,
because obviously LilyPond would want to make the distance much
greater.

(In fact, with a value like 2, you'd probably get a uniform spacing
throughout the document, since it's probably rare that default spacing
would be less than that.)

Setting the value to something like 6 would allow the distance to vary
with shorter measures of different sizes, but would cap the spread to
6 so the rest would still be legible when spacing is loose.

Happy New Year to you, too!

David