Re: Close-together chords with dotted durations

[Andrew Hawryluk]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 11:04 PM, George_ <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Basically, my problem is this - I want to typeset this chord:
> <f g a b c d e>4.
>
> And this is what I get:
> http://www.nabble.com/file/p18251902/1.jpg
>
> Because the notes of the chord are so close together and there are so many
> of them, the dots all queue up. Surely there must be a way to eliminate all
> the extra dots around the chord? I'm sure that even though it's not correct,
> four or five dots are enough to get across to the player/reader that all the
> notes are to be of dotted duration.

I found some published examples where there are fewer augmentation
dots than note heads to avoid the problem that George describes. They
are from piano reductions in choral pieces by Eric Whitacre: "When
David Heard" and "Water Night" published by Walton Music. (You can
hear excerpts at http://www.ericwhitacre.com/main.html)

I don't know if the standard music engraving literature says anything
about having more note heads than augmentation dots, but I think it
the correct thing to do. Based on these examples, it looks like the
algorithm could be
  Identify any groups of four or more adjacent note heads in a chord
  For each group:
    Find the second highest and second lowest note heads and place
       their augmentation dots in the spaces that would normally be chosen
    Add dots to any empty spaces between the first two dots
    Add one dot above and one dot below the existing ones

Andrew

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