Valentin, I'm not trying to start an email flame war. But it really bothers me when programmers get condescending with users, implying that we are stupid if we can't understand the documentation, or if we don't have all hundreds of pages of snippets using complex overrides and Scheme tweaks memorized.
The problem with the LilyPond documentation is that users have to understand Scheme in order to understand LilyPond. A programming language should be completely self contained. My impression is that about 30-40% of all of the examples in the documentation include Scheme code to make the LilyPond code work. I still haven't figured out when plain "text" quotes are adequate for a command, and when #"text" scheme contants are needed for a command. And what the heck does a #' mean with some of the commands? In other words, reading the documentation, I can't figure out which commands are LilyPond commands and which are Scheme commands. There are pages and pages of context and variable names without a clue as to what they mean or how a user off-the-street is supposed to change their values. I guess you could say I have a love-hate relationship with LilyPond. I love the parts that are intuitively obvious and I hate the parts that I can't figure out without wasting days of trial and error. > Here is the snippet I added: > http://lsr.dsi.unimi.it/LSR/Item?id=300 Your LSR explanation incorrectly implies that \fill-line is equivalent to center. The correct explanation is that \fill-line equally spaces all of the text objects in the list across the width of the page. If there is only one object, then the behavior of \fill-line results in it being centered. \fill-line {The quick brown fox} results in something like: The quick brown fox \fill-line {"The quick brown fox"} results in something like: The quick brown fox Whereas, \center-align {The quick brown fox} results in something like: The quick brown fox and \center-align {"The quick brown fox"} results in something like: brown fox Put yourself in the shoes of a new user trying to center a line of text who has already tried center-align. On his own, searching the documentation, he would never intuitively figure out that the command \fill-line is what he is looking for. Now imagine that new user trying to program something like: SMALL LITANY Deacon: Again and again, in peace, let us pray to the Lord. \score { MUSIC FOR "Choir: Lord have mercy" } Deacon: Help us, save us, have mercy on us, and keep us, O God, by Thy grace. \score { MUSIC FOR "Choir: Lord have mercy" } Deacon: Commemorating or most holy, most pure, most blessed and glorious lady, Theotokos, and ever-virgin Mary with all the saints, let us commend ourselves and each other, and all our life unto Christ our God. \score { MUSIC FOR "Choir: To Thee, O Lord." } Priest: For Thou art a good God and lovest mankind, and unto Thee we ascribe glory: to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. \score { MUSIC FOR "Choir: Amen" } THIRD ANTIPHON - TROPARIA ON BEATITUDES MODE 3 \score { MUSIC FOR VERSE "1. In Thy kingdom remember us O Lord, when Thou comest into Thy kingdom. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." } Reader: 1. He Who in ancient times by divine gesture gathered the water into a single mass and parted the sae for the people of Israel, even He is our God, exceedingly glorious; to Him alone do we sing, for He has been glorified. \score { MUSIC FOR VERSE "2. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." } Reader: 2. Second troparion. \score { MUSIC FOR VERSE "3. Blessed are the meek ..." } Reader: 3. Third troparion. And, I confess that my solution a few months ago was to use \hspace to brute force put the text where I wanted it by trial and error. This was a pain but solved my problem at the time. What really frustrated me was the vertical spacing issues which are perfectly illustrated in Valentin's LSR snippet. A \markup always gravitates closer to the score after it, which makes formatting the twelve verses of my sample third antiphon above nearly impossible. I gave up trying to understand the \markup documentation when I discovered I could use OOoLilyPond to create png score snippets for each hymn that I could paste into MS Word documents containing the text of the church service. Then I have complete WYSIWYG control over the page layout. For pure production, this is by far the fastest solution I have found to get work done. Note: swriter gets really unstable when you have a lot of OOoLilyPond snippets (I had 2 crashes on two separate documents in one week), or I would not have needed to use MS Word. Once you get the OOoLilyPond template correctly set up for your project, the swriter user interface is actually pretty good. If there was a way to combine the jEdit editor with the OOoLilyPond popup window inside swriter, I would be in heaven. Paul _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user