Re: Note duration line (contemporary)

[Paul Morris]

On Nov 28, 2012, at 7:02 PM, Jeffrey Trevino <address@hidden> wrote:

It's a long-term goal of mine to learn enough about the Scheme side of Lilypond to be able to design stencils, and custom notational constructs more broadly, like you've just done. It seems like graphic flexibility with \markup is documented really well, but I've yet to get the basics of how I can use Scheme to control Lilypond at a low-level graphically as you've just done. Do you -- or anyone else reading -- have a suggestion about which source code or documentation I should take a look at to start learning how?

Hi Jeffrey,  I have found that the LSR is really your friend here.  I have been able to learn a *lot* by following (reverse-engineering) the way certain examples are done there (with help from the LilyPond documentation and online scheme tutorials).

Try a search for "stencil" to look at relevant snippets:  

http://lsr.dsi.unimi.it/LSR/Search?q=stencil

LilyPond's Scheme tutorial helped me get started with Scheme (if you haven't seen it):

http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/extending/scheme-tutorial

Here's a great snippet on creating custom stencils:

http://lsr.dsi.unimi.it/LSR/Item?id=623

And here's a good site for making sense of cubic bezier curves:

http://cubic-bezier.com

Harm's advice about following the user list is good too.  It is really impressive how far you can go with customizing LilyPond with Scheme.

-Paul