Re: suggestion for emproving NR: fingering istructions

[Jonathan Kulp]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Mark Polesky <address@hidden> wrote:

Federico Bruni wrote:
> from my privileged position of newbie ;-)
> I have a suggestion for a very tiny edit in the Notation
> Reference which might ease the understanding for new users.
>
> This is the page (section Selected Snippets):
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/Inside-the-staff#Fingering-instructions
>
> What is missing there, IMHO, is a clear statement like
> "left-hand fingerings must be entered within a chord construct
> <> (i.e.: even single notes must be enclosed by < >)".
>
> There is a similar sentence in the right-hand fingering chapter:
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/Common-notation-for-fretted-strings#Right_002dhand-fingerings
>
> So why don't you add in the left-hand as well?
>
> I've lost hours trying to figure out why left orientation worked
> just for chords and not for single notes.
> That sentence would have saved me a lot of time and frustration.

Sorry to hear about your frustrations -- I totally understand! And
thanks (very much) for alerting us to a potential source of
confusion. Remember that LilyPond is still a work-in-progress, and
everyone can help! We usually try to clarify sources of confusion
pretty quickly, so these reports are useful. However, it's better
to offer suggestions like this to the developers' mailing list at
address@hidden.
archive - http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/
subscribe - http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel

I guess the best place to add this would be in the snippet called
"Controlling the placement of chord fingerings" in the "Fingering
instructions" section. Probably the title should be changed to
"Controlling the placement of fingerings", because apparently the
placement of single-note fingerings is also dependent on the <...>
construct. The snippet *does* provide examples of single notes
enclosed in <...>, but I admit it would be easy for a novice to
overlook the significance of this.

Ok I've updated two of those snippets in LSR to give this explicit warning, something that gave me fits when I was working on the fretted strings section last year, too.  We added the example with the single notes in chords at some point but a warning is appropriate here.  The changes should make it into the development docs in the next couple of days, if I understand the way this works. 

Best,

Jon
-- 
Jonathan Kulp
http://www.jonathankulp.com