On Wednesday, 28 October 1998, Han-Wen Nienhuys writes:
> Content-Description: forwarded message
>
> Hi. I found lilypond on the net a few days ago, it is a *fantastic*
> piece of work. Thanks! I had tried musixtex, but lilypond is much
> more user-friendly.
Thanks!
Actually, we're primarily aiming for high quality output
(you know, there are preprocessors for Musi*tex too).
> I am using lilypond to typeset a four-part Mass for performance at
> Christmas in my parish, and have some feedback about some things that
> I've run into. Please take into account that I have very little
> knowledge of the terminology for music notation, I am a computer
> programmer, not a musician.
Ah, that's good; lots of time left to do hacking, if necessary.
> - All the \p, \mf, \f, etc. end up beneath the staff. When I do four
> voices on two staves, I would like them either above or below the
> staff, depending on the voice. For example, on the treble staff, I
> would like soprano dynamics above the staff, where the soprano
> lyrics are, and alto dynamics beneath the staff where the alto
> lyrics are.
There's a property called "dynamicdir", try
\property Staff.dynamicdir = 1
a\mf
(urg, the names property should be revised, ydirection/dynamicdir...)
> - There is no way to add tempo markings such as "Adagio", "Lento",
> etc.
You can hack it like it's done in los-toros-oboe.ly:
\property Voice . textstyle = "large"
a^"Allegro"
to do this the right way, Lily has to know about (changing) tempos.
> - There is no way to do a fermata.
a-\fermata
> - There is no way to do breath marks (or whatever they are called -
> they look like commas).
Try the very ugly:
a^"\\sethuge{\\ \\ '}"
something like this should be added as a script.
> - There is no way to do those long multi-note triangular dynamics
> marks (sorry, I don't know what they are called).
a\< \!a
> - It would be nice if I could insert page breaks, similar to the way
> that I can use \break at present to break lines.
Page formatting is on the feature list for 1.1. The only thing you can
do is tune the line/staff height and papersize.
(we had this question before, is there doco on this, except for the
mail archive?)
> - There seems to be something funny about the PostScript used to do
> the bracket that connects staves in a StaffGroup, it aborts the
> printjob on my printer. Perhaps it contains PostScript level 2? I
> have only a level 1 printer. The workaround was to make my own
> version of StaffGroup without the bracket engraver.
Uhm, that may very well be the case. You can use ghostscript to do
the rendering. The definition of the bracket is in tex/lily-ps-defs.tex.
> - Trying to use ly2dvi with page numbering turned off crashes with an
> error:
>
> $ ly2dvi -N kyrie-2.ly
> ly2dvi 0.0.5
> Traceback (innermost last):
> File "/usr/bin/ly2dvi", line 1096, in ?
> main()
> File "/usr/bin/ly2dvi", line 992, in main
> Props.setNonumber('commandline')
> TypeError: not enough arguments; expected 3, got 2
Hmm, i'd have to check...
> - It would be nice if there were a way to control the overall sizing
> of the output with a single parameter. I.e., cause the output pages
> to have more or fewer measures on them, with automatic changes in
> the size of the fonts used for the various things. Much like I can
> change the global point size in groff.
Is this really useful? I think nice music only comes in discrete sizes,
which means you can choose between 16 or 20pt. What we really want is
to have a set of predefined paper settings, eg a4, b4-on-a4, a5-on-a4?
> - It would be nice if you used the C preprocessor or something similar
> instead of \include. This would let me use #ifdef and #define. I
Urg. We're not going to do macros, ever. That too ugly. We are thinking
of parameterisation (e.g. string manipulation functions), but that's just
thinking for now. We're not so eager to define yet another programming
language.
If you must have macros, use m4 as a preprocessor, there are some examples
in the mutopia tree.
> am currently setting the same piece in two different ways, one for
> organist and one for the vocalists, and would like to have some
> minor differences between them, while still using common input
> files.
Why is \include not convenient, then?
> - The documentation needs some work. I am not really sure what all
> that \type stuff is about, for example, and I still don't know how
> to change the point size of the output (I gather from the
> documentation that this is possible somehow).
\paper{
\paper_sixteen
}
to get 16 iso 20pt
several examples of this in init/* and mutopia/*
Of course, you're right. The last three months, we've been working
almost exclusively on bugfixes, making small esthetic improvements
and documentation. Development almost came to a halt, so now we've
moved into development again. There'll probably not be a lot of
simple enhancements from our hands in the near future.
Anyway, this is a FAQ:
question(Why is the documentation/website/etc. so lousy?)
LilyPond development is moving quite fast, documentation will often
lag a bit behind. We must always make a choice between writing more
doco, writing more code and answering email.
If you think you can make a correction, or devised a solution that
should be documented, please do so and send in a patch.
Greetings,
Jan.
Btw, what version do you use, (latest is 1.0.17)?
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien/lilypond
