After having doing quite a lot music typesetting with the MusiXTeX
packages I found that it might be interesting to compare with the
facilities of the lilypond package. Therefore as the LilyPond 1.2.0 was
released and ported to win32 I downloaded it and with a little help from
Jeffrey got it up and running on my win98 station. I agreed with Jeffrey
to do some win98 testing of his port and began working on a pair of test
sources.
During my editing I've found what I believe to be bugs:
1.
In order to get a very narrow spaced measure for a special purpose in
one of my scores I tried to achieve that by inserting a 3/16 measure.
But Lilypond doesn't like that and abends with this error message:
Calculating column positions... [3]assertion "d >= 0 && d <= 100 CM"
failed: file "spring-spacer.cc", line 376
2.
I generally prefere to do source file editing with emacs and therefore
installed mudela-mode within my emacs load-path. Emacs wouldn't
byte-compile line 163:
(setf comment-start-skip "%{")
before I changed it to
(setq comment-start-skip "%{")
My elisp knowledge is more than modest but nonetheless I wonder if this
line isn't superfluous as comment-start-skip is defined a few lines
earlier in the statement
(setq comment-end "\n"
comment-start "%"
comment-start-skip "%{? *"
block-comment-start "%{"
block-comment-end "%}"
)
And now to some items for the lilypond wish list:
- I would like to avoid that ties across line breaks run _through_ the
clef on the new line
- I would like the possibility of forcing clef- and key- changes to be
printed _after_ the new bar line
- I would like an option to define the number of systems on which the
score must be distributed. As it is now it seems that I may only
influence that indirectly through the gourlay_maxmeasures property.
- if I change the property minVerticalAlign in a multi staff score with
lyrics the change affects the lyrics too. I would like the change to
_only_ affect staves.
- I would like to be able to influence the sloping of xtuplet brackets
- for one of my test scores containing a modern edition of an early
17'th century composition I have a leading measure containing the
orginal clefs and note values of the original composition. I use the
"harmonic" and "diamond" note head styles for that measure and would
like to have the stems of these notes _centered_ on the notehead as in
the mensural music notation.
- after the leading measure in the above mentioned score I want a double
bar line fully drawn across the staves and after that keep to the
ChoirStaff bar line types in the rest of the scores
- I would like to be able to define invisible melismatic slurs in order
to avoid printing slurs conflicting with an original ms of printing. Of
course I can achieve that by just inserting empty syllables in the
lyrics. But this facility implemented in the MusiXTeX preprocessor M-tx
is nice so ...
- if I explicitly beam notes in a staff with auto beaming disabled I
would like to have these beams also to be melismatic.
- do I need to get warnings on 'No one to print a repeat brace' when I
issue a '\repeat fold 2 \alternative' statement with an empty leading
text item in a \lyrics context in order to achieve multiple lyrics lines
in a _section_ of a score ?
Of course I'll provide my test scores if anybody want them.
Regards
--
Christian Mondrup, Computer Programmer
Scandiatransplant, Skejby Hospital, University Hospital of Aarhus
Brendstrupgaardsvej, DK 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark
Phone: +45 89 49 53 01
