5.4.4 Spanners

Many objects of musical notation extend over several notes or even several bars. Examples are slurs, beams, tuplet brackets, volta repeat brackets, crescendi, trills, and glissandi. Such objects are collectively called “spanners”, and have special properties to control their appearance and behavior, as well as special tweaking methods related to the fact that they can be broken across systems.

LilyPond Notation Reference v2.25.14 (development-branch).