At least section 1.2.2 of the reference manual ought to be updated to
include <> in the discussion of invisible rests.
Can you share how you would want that section changed? Or I could take a stab at it, but it may not be what you want. Also, <> can be used for a lot of different things that aren't rests, so maybe that section of the Notation manual is not the best place for it.
Agreed! In fact it's not a rest but the empty chord construct
should rather be seen as a placeholder without any duration, to
which you can attach things that normally are attached to notes.
The question is where to best describe it in the manuals. If you
search the full manuals for <>, the construct is used in
several examples without any explanation, but there are also a few
places where "empty chord" is described in conjunction with
special cases of how to use it (see the entries for "chord, empty"
in the Lilypond Index). In A.15 there's even a reference to the
learning manual,
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.25/Documentation/learning-big-page#structure-of-a-note-entry,
which unfortunately doesn't seem to explain it either, even though
the construct is used in several examples also in the learning
manual.
Perhaps one suitable place could be Sect. 1.3.1 of the NR "1.3.1
Expressive marks attached to notes", but it could also be worth
mentioning in 1.7 "Editorial annotations", for example.
Technically, Sect. 1.5.1 "Chorded Notes" is the natural place to
describe it, but that's probably not the most obvious place to
look when you don't know about the construct.
/Mats
