On 2022-03-25 01:44, Valentin Petzel wrote: Subject: Slanted Beams thickness From: Valentin Petzel [1]<valen...@petzel.at> Date: 2022-03-25 01:44
To: [2]lilypond-devel@gnu.org Hello, Lilypond handles slanted Beams in a geometrically weird way, that is, the thickness is not measured as the shortest distance between the opposing sides of the boundary, but as vertical distance. This results in Beams getting optically thinner and closer the higher the slope is. But we can very easily factor this out by adjusting the thickness to the slope. In fact if we want to achieve a real thickness theta the adjusted thickness would need to be theta·sqrt(1 + slope²). See attached an experimental example. Cheers, Valentin A couple of points, on top of what has already been brought up. As has already been said, you will hardly notice any difference unless the slope is very high, which is a situation that you anyway try to avoid as much as possible, which also makes it hard to find examples in typeset scores. After all, that's one of the main reasons to use kneed beams. My gut feeling is that a mathematically exact solution is not likely to provide the most pleasing effect to the eye. There are already a number of optical corrections applied in LilyPond to handle other such discrepancies between the mathematically most obvious solution and the visually most pleasing solution. Something in between the current and the newly proposed approach is likely to look best. Even though a general guiding approach for Lilypond's layout decisions is to imitate old hand engraved scores, we shouldn't necessarily copy layout decisions that were caused by technical limitations in the hand engraving process, if we have a general agreement that something else looks better. /Mats References 1. mailto:valen...@petzel.at 2. mailto:lilypond-devel@gnu.org