Re: 4 hands piano pieces book

[Hwaen Ch'uqi]

Greetings Alberto,

I have been wwriting A LOT of four-hand music, and I agree in
principle with most of what I have read in this thread. Even so, I
thought to chime in with my approach. As has been advised, I create
two separate book files, one for Secondo and one for Primo. The top of
each file is headed with the following:

#(define-markup-command (four-hand-page layout props offset) (number?)
  (let* (
    (two-hand (chain-assoc-get 'page:page-number-string props))
    (four-hand (number->string (+ offset (* 2 (string->number two-hand))))))
    (interpret-markup layout props four-hand)))

Then, in the \paper block, I include the following for the Secondo part:

oddHeaderMarkup = \markup \fill-line {
  \four-hand-page #0
  " "
}
    evenHeaderMarkup = ##f

Or, for the Primo part:

oddHeaderMarkup = \markup \fill-line {
  " "
  \four-hand-page #1
}
evenHeaderMarkup = ##f

In this way, each part will begin with the correct page number, and
the numbering will increase by two automatically.

In my experience, I have found that there can be no "master file" used
for determining page breaks, due to the lovely but unpredictable way
that LilyPond lays out pages. So this must still be done by trial and
error. I do, however, use the Secondo file in the end as a "master"
for generating a Table of Contents.

Finally, I also use pdftk to produce the full book, but the process
outlined earlier can be extremely streamlined if you use the "collate"
feature. You do not need to burst the files into separate pages; pdftk
will automatically alternate the pages when combining the two files.

I hope this has been helpful.

Hwaen Ch'uqi


On 5/8/16, David Wright <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sun 08 May 2016 at 19:13:37 (+0200), Jacques Menu Muzhic wrote:
>> Would dynamics parts dedicated to breaks and pageBreaks, stored in
>> variables, be useful? They might contain only spacer rests and such
>> breaks, and be used by Piano I and Piano II parts.
>>
>> I use this satisfactorily to produce director and musicians parts, with
>> the same breaks in the first drafts to facilitate cross checking of the LP
>> input code.
>
> This seems to be the mainstream way of handling breaks and pageBreaks
> (though I hadn't thought of specifically using a Dynamics context).
>
>> One would still have to place things in the right order in the input file
>> to build the left and right pages, of course.
>
> I wouldn't try to build the score in display order at all. In fact,
> if you want to be able to start a new piece halfway down the page, I
> think you'd get into a real mess.
>
> I would typeset the primo and secondo in separate scores, using \books
> to write separate PDF files.
>
> I would use breakbefore = ##t to get the titling out of the way on
> page 1.
>
> Consequently, primo would have its first music on page 2. All
> subsequent page breaks would be written:
>
> \pageBreak % skips to the next page...
> \markup { " " }
> \pageBreak % ...and that leaves a page blank (except the page number).
>
> so that a blank page is left for secondo, and every odd page is blank.
> (Probably put this construction in a variable.)
>
> Secondo would start with an immediate extra:
>
> \pageBreak % skips to the next page...
> \markup { " " }
> \pageBreak % ...and that leaves a page blank (except the page number).
>
> so that its first music is on page 3. Continue as with primo, so every
> even page is blank.
>
> If this looks familiar, it's because this is a rehash of
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2016-05/msg00069.html
>
> Burst the two PDFs into two directories and delete all the empty pages
> (ie every other file). Move the remaining files from either directory
> into the other. Concatenate the PDFs exactly as before, except now the
> output file is called interleaved-output.pdf instead of
> decimated-output.pdf.
>
>> [A.N.Other] said:
>
>> > The initial problem is getting the page breaks in sync.
>> > Once you've achieved that (presumably by manually adding page breaks)
>> > you can easily create two separate pdfs and use an external tool to
>> > create the bound volume.
>
> Write your page breaks into *one* variable. Where you give this variable
> to \new Dynamics in the \score structures, prefix *only* secondo with
> an extra copy of the three-liner above. This approach guarantees the same
> pagebreaks for the two players, but pushes secondo forward by one page.
>
> Cheers,
> David.
>
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