Re: "Too many clashing notecolumns" message

[Mats Bengtsson]

>       Hello !
> 
>       I'm new on the list. I installed LilyPond 1.4.12.jcn5 for Windows 
> (Win98 SE) with Cygwin at the beginning of June. Install was OK.
> 
>       I've got the following message from my LilyPond console (marked by a 
> '<ÿ'):
> 
> Calculating column positions... warning: Too many clashing notecolumns.  
> Ignorin
> g them.

This usually appears when you have several simultaneous notes in 
the same voice and Lilypond isn't able to shift the note head
horizontally to avoid collisions. Mostly the result looks OK
anyway, but it might be worth taking an extra look at the output.

Sometimes, what you really want to do is to have separate voices
on the same stave, letting the stems point in different directions
for the two voices. For example, compare the following two scores:

\score{
  \notes\relative c'{
    c2 d2 |
    <\context Voice = upper {\voiceOne e4 f g f | e2 d }
     \context Voice = lower {\voiceTwo c4 e f d | g f e d }>
    c1}
}
 
\score{
  \notes\relative c'{
    c2 d2 |
    <{e4 f g f | e2 d }
     {c4 e f d | g f e d }>
    c1}
}


>       What does it means ? How to avoid it ? Does a detailled list of error 
> messages exist somewhere ?

No, unfortunately not.


   /Mats