I am considering trying to implement a first attempt at providing a Baroque lute tab facility. This may turn out to be a bite too large for me, but hey, that's the way to learn. The first phase would be to implement a minimal set of facilities which would output something like Baroque tab in the German, English, French style from standard notemode input. The key elements are a duration indication above the TabStaff, an indication of bass courses below the TabStaff, a special way of indicating stroke finger and frets indicated by letters.
You can see an ideal representation of French Baroque lute tab as produced by Fronimo here http://www.mateus-lutes.com/tablature/barbe_egautier.pdf. By modifying the input stream and inserting computed markups, it is possible to produce something promising, but this is not a practical approach and I'd like now to move to a 'proper' implementation. I'd like to install the elements required for Baroque lute tab as independent features which may be turned on or off as required. That way some of them might be useful in other ways or for other instruments. They would all be brought together in new lute tab contexts. Below are my preliminary thoughts for implementation. Is this a sensible/suitable/best approach? Any other comments welcome. --------------------- Phase I Lettered fret indications Based on "Letter tablature formatting" example from LSR Needs to be installed in scm/translation-functions.scm Call it fret-letter-tablature-format Invoked by overriding tablatureFormat in TabStaff The font to be used can be overridden in TabNoteHead Can't use the rather nice Fronimo font as licence is incompatible with LilyPond's, but users can install and use Fronimo fonts (except for commercial use) Duration changes New Tab_duration_engraver to draw heads, stems and flags above tab Crib from note-name-engraver.cc and stem-engraver.cc Makes new TabDuration grob New context properties: tabDurationChangeOnly (bool) #f (default) #t (for baroque lute) TabDuration properties tab-duration-style (symbol) 'modern or 'baroque-lute Bass courses New Bass_course_engraver to draw bass course symbols below tab Also cribbed from note-name-engraver.cc and stem-engraver.cc Makes new BassCourse grob New context properties: bassTunings Stroke Fingerings Modify New_fingering_engraver Dots for stroke fingering activated by new Fingering property stroke-finger-style (symbol) 'numeric' (default) or 'dots' Lute tab contexts New contexts LuteTabStaff and LuteTabVoice to draw all this (and a few other things) together Thanks for your attention, Trevor _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel