Figured Bass Questions.....

[Trent J]

Good Morning all,

IÂ’ve been playing around with Lilypond for quite a while now. IÂ’ve been 
evaluating it type setting quite a variety of scores – mainly baroque works 
instrumental and vocal using both ancient time signatures and notes and have 
found the output to be excellent. I've even started using Linux-Fedora (a 
big leap from windows) so I can use the latest versions of lilypond.

The only reservations that I have now is the figured bass. I have looked up 
several questions people have about this and found a variety of different 
figuring which does not seem to work well together.

My questions are these:

Proper alignment of figures eg.

   7
 #3
   2

ItÂ’s most important that the sharp on the three be on the left of the number 
and not on the right so as not to confuse a sharpened 3rd resolution after 
the current figures.

I have tried several markups which never quite able to match these figures 
(the figured bass context is too weak to provide the complexity of some 
figured bass settings)

The other question is the thin line representing a holding of the previous 
part of the figured bass. ie. Some or all of the previous chord is held.

Eg.     5        ---
               7    	 b6         the thin line (  ---  ) indicates that the 
5th note should be held while adding the flattened 6th  or

6       _____
5

indicating that the previous chord is to be heldÂ…. This can be held for 
either for the next bass notes or a series of bass notes.

Does anyone have a full scheme/way of setting out a figured bass?

Any help in this matter would be appreciated. Are there any plans to 
strengthen figured bass support? I would suggest that if there was then 
lilypond would possibly be the best notation package available being able to 
typeset all music. It might even rival SCORE (the mysterious notation 
package that only ‘bigger’ music publishing firms can seem to get their 
hands on).