First of all, I appreciate your quick reply. Big thanks. ^_^
As a side note, my first music publishing (and my only one before Lilypond)
experience is Finale (an old version). Therefore, I am used to tweaking
positions and couldn't help myself expecting similar "smart" placement of
items in Lilypond. Because of my very limited knowledge in (La)TeX, there
could be stuff that is possible in Lilypond but I don't know how to do it.
Please bear with me.
Keep up the good work. Someday I might consider spending some time reading
the code and tweak it, or try something like the Harmonia project (X
interface to Lilypond).
>-=-> Desmond Lam, University of Waterloo, Computer Science <-=-<
Email/ScreenFIRE: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 346028 CoolMail: 69390/dfylam
QOTD: "You sing like 'For the Lord hath send forth His legions of demons
to send the audience to hell.'" J. Tute, MUSIC117
On Thu, 1 Apr 1999, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> > 1) The lyrics collide with some notes (slightly) and slurs (very
> > obvious). Does lilypond have calculation to avoid collision of
> > different items, such as lyrics, dynamics, articulations, etc.?
>
> Yes, but the one for slurs is obviously flawed :-)
After sending that email to you, I proceeded to add dynamics and slurs to
the score. Apparently, the lyrics collided with notes with low leger lines
(notable starting with B). Also, dynamics like "pp", "mf", and "fp" are not
aligned horizontally. This alignment problem becomes more obvious when
hairpins are added. At least I don't expect it in the dynamics level.
So far I have typeset two scores: an invention and a 4 voice choral piece.
The invention is OK except that occasionally notes get croweded near the end
of a system (compared to the first or second bar). The second piece (on
which the last email was based on) poses more problems since I am using over
70% of the feature in Lilypond, and I actually see how all the pieces work
together.
> > 3) I notice that the word extension (the long horizontal line invoked by
> > "__") goes all the way to the beginning of the next "note" after the
> > duration of the word right before "__". In some cases it produces
> > undesirable effects. Wouldn't it be better if the line just extends to
> > the last note in the melisma? Perhaps put this feature into another
> > function?
>
> You can attach the extender to a syllable containing only a
> space. Does that work?
I will give that a try, but that means for each melisma I have to do that
tweak. Consider the example on melisma (with text "Foo Bar") in your
Tutorial/Reference. The extension of "Foo" goes all the way to the
beginning of "Bar". I doubt if that is desirable. It just happens that in
my choral piece, there is an extension where the end of it appears on the
next page. This is because the extension, by default, goes to the very
beginning of the next note (or the very end of the specified duration in the
Lyrics context).
Oh, I think I had a situation in which it was not possible to use the method
you suggested.
I have yet to check other scores on extension, but my practice
(non-professional, of course) is to extend it just below the very last note
of the melisma. What is your opinion on it? If you take my practice, then
we definitely need a way to specify arbitrary durations composed of a
summation of different basic durations (i.e. the available notes).
> > 6) As a follow-up of (5), it would be nice to choose the type of
> > bracket.
>
> I don't understand. What kind of types do you mean?
There are at least 3 types of brackets in Finale: brace (for piano), square
(for choral), and I can't remember the third one. Of course there is an
option not to put any brackets. There could be times where a brace bracket
would wrap more than two staves, e.g. Schumann's (prelude/study?) in F#
major uses 3 staves.
Consider a conductor's score. It is typical to have 20 staves in one
system, in which there could be several groups indicated by brackets, e.g.
square for strings, brace for piano, etc.
> > 7) Suppose I have a staff with 2 voices in it, and in some places I want
> > the lyrics of the upper voice to appear above the staff, whereas in
> > other places everything stays the same, i.e., under the staff. Is it
> > possible?
>
> Yes, I guess so. It sounds analogous to staff switching for piano
> music. You can make two Lyrics parts, above and below your staff, and
> use a
>
> \type Lyrics = upper { " "1*32 }
> \type Staff { music }
> \type Lyrics = lower { .. lyrics .. \translator Lyrics = upper rest .. }
>
I haven't tried it yet, but why would you suggest a \translator instead of
typing the lyrics for the upper line in the "upper" Lyrics context?
> > 8) It would be great if I can add markings and footnotes like those in
> > teaching books, where you would have "(a)", "(1)", or "*" in the score
> > and then a footnote at the bottom of the page.
>
> It would need some hacking to achieve this: you have to insert a
> \footnote{} command somewhere into the output.
Time to dig into my LaTeX manual. :)
For the rest of the questions I asked last time, I will give them a try as
you have suggested.
Here is a few more problems I ran into last night:
1) When I am mixing slurs, hairpins (\< \!), and barchecks, sometimes I
would get a parse error in which case it seems perfectly legit. For
example, "s2 s2 ( \< \! |". The error would occur at the bar check. It's
OK then if I remove it.
2) When I move the slurs from the notes to another staff full of invisible
rests (e.g. "a4 () b" in one staff to "s4 () s") where the two staves are to
be stacked together, I would get a message that says something like
"Warning: Unbounded spanning: Slurs".
3) I get lots of warning messages concerning constraints, like:
"Active_...(): degenerate constants"
"...: Too much degeneracy"
"solution doesn't satisfy constraints"
Does it have to do with space calculation?
4) Do you think it is helpful to the end user if an intermediate .tex file
is saved? I know the internals look ugly, but it may help in some cases.
5) Suggestion: What about split points in a bar? You know how lengthy a
cadenza could be. Sometimes it is necessary to cut a bar into two to fit
the cadenza nicely into a system. Another occasion would be choral music.
Lyrics take up a lot of space. There are times where fitting a particular
measure would be too crowded, and taking it away would make the notes in the
system too far apart. A nice solution would be to break it into two.
Perhaps a user can suggest some split points in a bar?
6) Suggestion: Lines. Solid, dotted, or dashed. End points could be notes
or lyrics. E.g. directing a part to switch the text from one line to
another (just an reminder to the singers).
7) Suggestion: Pedal markings. I suppose everybody uses brackets instead of
the "Leo/*" pair, but it wouldn't hurt to include it too.
8) Suggestion: Tempo and expression marking, like "Andante (<quarter note> =
55)". Can appear above a system anywhere in the score.
---
OK, that's it for now. Maybe it's more than the easter eggs you've got for
your weekend. Thanks for your time.
Yours,
Desmond Lam
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
