Re: Adjustment to tablature output

[Christopher Webster]

Thank you, David.

I must preface my remarks by saying that I'm no expert in lute tablature, and by repeating that my immediate needs are met by what I now know how to ask LilyPond to do for me.

But I think a typical example of what one might ideally achieve is at http://tony.c.pagesperso-orange.fr/fretful/Viol/Hume/PDF/111ThePrincesAlmayne.pdf or any of the other files linked from http://tony.c.pagesperso-orange.fr/fretful/ViolPage.htm#table .  Those seem to have been typeset by a program named StringWalker, which I think has been superseded by one named Django.  (See http://musickshandmade.com/projects/DjangoDemo/Help/html/djangoversusstringwalker.html).

All the best

            Christopher.

On 2012-05-10 02:09, David Nalesnik wrote:

Hi,

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 10:13 AM, Carl Sorensen <address@hidden> wrote:

On 5/9/12 8:01 AM, "Choan Gálvez" <address@hidden> wrote:

>
>Nice. But... it still results in the same ugly (to me) vertical
>alignments: letters with ascendant strokes look nice, letters with
>descendant strokes are aligned by its bottom, letters without ascendants
>or descendants leave a gap between its bottom and the line. See
>attachment.

The challenge is that note heads are intended to be centered vertically on
the desired placement.  And apparently your usage for tablature is to have
the fret labels *rest* on the staff line, rather than be *centered* in the
staff gap.

This is potentially resolvable, because markup text does have a baseline
reference.  It will require something more than adding the offset, however.

Probably a new stencil function should be defined, and the stencil
property of the TabNoteHead overwritten.

I don't have time to write the new function right now, but I hope that
pointing you (or others) in the right direction may help.

I'm not confident I understand how you'd like the letters to align.  If you want the bottom-most point of the letters to touch the staff line (even though this means that they won't line up as in the text I'm typing now), then the stencil override Carl mentions might be achieved like this:

\new TabStaff

 \with

 {

   tablatureFormat = #fret-letter-tablature-format

   \override TabNoteHead #'whiteout = ##f

 }

 {

   \override TabNoteHead #'stencil = #(lambda (grob)

     (ly:stencil-translate-axis

       (ly:stencil-aligned-to (tab-note-head::print grob) Y -1)

       (ly:staff-symbol-line-thickness grob) Y))

   e' f' fis' g' gis' a' ais' b' c'' cis'' d'' dis'' e'' f'' fis'' g'' gis''

 }

For some reason, the override won't work for me inside the \with block.

Do you want some separation between the characters and the staff line?  If not, the line-thickness of the staff line should be halved.

HTH,

David