Thanks, Aleksa, for your reply! I suppose that if needed, I can use X-offset and extra-offset, as you say.
In the long run, the ideal (the “wish list” item for me) would be a way to override self-alignment-X to #N (standing for “note head”) — or something like that — to tell LilyPond to place the rehearsal mark centered over a note head rather than using break-alignable-interface (the current behavior — thank you for the link!). The substantive/musical reason behind my request: Like many singers and choir directors focused on early music, I would like to do more singing from editions without bar lines. One of the biggest barriers to greater use of barline-less editions in our century is that choirmasters need a way to tell their singers “Let’s start rehearsing from XYZ moment in the middle of the piece” without any ambiguity as to where XYZ falls. Please consider the example of Renaissance polyphony in my previous email (I’m pasting the screenshot here again for convenience). A choir director would generally want the singing to start at the beginning of an instance of the word “alleluja.” But there is only one word-initial syllable in this passage that happens to fall immediately after a bar line (in other words, that corresponds to a downbeat). If choirmasters want their group to start singing at the very beginning of this passage, they would have to remember to say “pickup to [letter]” rather than just “[letter]” — which they could easily forget in the heat of the moment. I’ve seen confusion happen in rehearsals for this very reason. Thanks, all, for considering my request for the developers (if this counts as one of those)! [image: image.png] On Mon, 15 Dec 2025, A Jakovljevic wrote: > Rehearsal marks are almost universally always placed at bar lines, then > there's no possibly ambiguity about where they are; and if there is an > obvious upbeat (which is highly unlikely to be the case if you're engraving > polyphony, but oh well) then it's not much trouble for the director to tell > "start on the upbeat of K"... Gould suggests they should either be > left-aligned or centered over the bar line, which seems good advice. >
