When typesetting a continuo realization (a right-hand part for a keyboard
player based on the figured bass) it is traditional to use a smaller staff
and smaller print, to indicate that these notes were not written by the
composer. However it is still desirable to group the bass line and the
realization together as a 2-staff instrument, set off with a curly bracket
to the left. I have not been able to figure out a way to do this.
\setsize n only works on an entire instrument; I can't make it work on one
staff of a 2-staff instrument. So unless there is a trick I'm missing, I
would like to request that this capability be added to MusiXTeX.
In the meanwhile, why can't I get by with making the realization a separate
one-line instrument?
1. I cannot figure out how to get a curly bracket around 2 separate 1-line
instruments.
2. If I settle for the straight bracket with \songtop...\songbottom, the
top of the bracket does not align correctly when the upper staff is reduced
in size. It appears that the bottom of bracket is OK but the top is too
low.
3. Another probably related problem is that the \interstaff above the
smaller-sized staff is also scaled down. It appears to be scaled down in
proportion to the difference in staff size. I tried to adjust this with
\setinterinstrument1{-.2\interstaff}\setinterinstrument2{.25\interstaff}
but it appears that only hard-wired dimensions are accepted here, and that
would be very cumbersome in scores where \interstaff varies from page to
page.
Any ideas, anyone?
--Don Simons
