Hi, Dirk-- > I seldom use automatic beams since most music I typeset is vocal. However, > instrumentalists seem to like beams better than unbeamed notes, so I made > a version with beams and lyrics. > > It's not very nice. > > 1. The stems are often uncomfortably short. Is there a way to tell PMX > "never make a stem shorter than xxx"?
Nope. Are you talking about the first pair of 16ths? If so, I think that's a matter of taste, and you do have the manual tweaks available. I suppose I could look into what you suggest, since PMX does already try to calculate stem lengths when setting up the height of a beam. And I would need to understand exactly what kind of limitation you're asking for, e.g., is it the clear path of all stems that you want to limit, or is it the total length top to bottom regardless of how many crossbeams there are. (I know I can do this by hand in the > PMX code, or even write a Lua script to postprocess the PMX code). > 2. The final bar is 3½ beats, complementing the upbeat in bar 0. > To do this, I issue a blind meter change to 7/8. PMX decides to group the > first > three notes together. I experimented with a purely instrumental piece in 7/8 > with some scales. (Scales work better in 7/8 than in 4/4.) PMX groups the > first > three notes together and keeps the other four detached. Is there a better > way than a blind meter change to make a curtailed final bar? Not that I know of. Since you've looked in the code, have a gander at subroutine findbeam to see how complex the automatic beam grouping scheme is. I don't even remember many details about it myself. But in any event it would be lots of work for minimal payoff to define automatic beaming in 5/x or 7/x meters. And I'm sure as soon as I tried anything simpler, e.g. like beaming 7/x as if it were (4+3)/x, someone would say they wanted (3+4)/x. To be honest, I'm not sure where the 3-note grouping is coming from, I suppose I could look into that. --Don ------------------------------- [email protected] mailing list If you want to unsubscribe or look at the archives, go to http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
