The stem tear-off repaired in 4132a7a had a twin one layer deeper, live in
the same fixture and baked into the same golden: the bottom staff's slur was
attributed to the TOP staff, kept shift 0, and tore off its own notes.
A distance metric cannot fix this one. A slur's start endpoint is deliberately
lifted off its notes -- staff_top + gap above, staff_bottom - gap below -- into
the inter-staff zone, where the nearest glyph is routinely a note on the
adjacent staff (here, a top-staff ledger note). So attribute a curve the way it
is drawn: the arc's direction picks the side. An upward arc (p1.y >= p0.y) hangs
below a staff -- take the greatest staff-line band bottom at or above p0.y; a
downward arc sits above one -- take the smallest band top at or below p0.y.
Fall back to the nearest band mid-line for a curve inside a staff.
Locked by a_slur_travels_with_its_own_staff, verified to fail without the fix
(d_bottom=8.695 > d_top=7.235 -- the slur riding the wrong staff).
Also assert the two metrics the solve moves rather than leaving them untested:
collision_penalty is 0 (the staves separate cleanly) and vertical_density_penalty
saturates at 1.0 -- the solve targets content extents while the metric scores the
realized gap against the band model's preferred height. That is the same
metric-vs-solver tension as casting_off under justification; DECISIONS.md records
it, plus three further reviewed gaps: staff-less content takes shift 0, the
preferred gap is read from the constructor rather than the region's declared
band, and the 3+-staff cumulative cascade is correct but unexercised.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Levi Neuwirth
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