Re: Can't get page breaks for 7 over square root of 71 meter

[Urs Liska]

Am 04.11.2016 um 01:36 schrieb mclaren:

A meter of 7/sqr(71) simply means that that there are 7 eighth notes each of
which has duration of square root of 71 = 1/8.426149 of a whole note,
whereas a standard eighth note has duration of 1/8 of a whole note. 
Therefore each eighth note in 7/sqr(71) meter has a duration of 8.426149/8 =
1.053268 of a regular eighth note. We use a rational approximation program
to get a rational fraction which approximates this value to within one part
in a billion, close enough.

The problem comes from Lilypond's bizarre assumption that at some point all
the barlines in the score will line up. In this case, clearly the barlines
in the 7/sqr(71) staff will never line up with any of the other barlines in
the score. Therefore Lilypond can't ever break the page. 

That's a) insane, b) stupid, c) unmusical, d) all three (take your pick). No
matter where I place bar checks and page breaks, Lilypond absolutely
posistively 100% utterly totally refuses to break the page.

What you are describing is none of your suggestions a) to c), at best you could label it a limitation.
LilyPond assumes that a line break happens at a single point in time through all staves of a system. This is a totally reasonable assumption, and when you have musical reasons to override this it is the case of an extreme exception. That LilyPond doesn't support this may be considered a limitation, but as mentioned in my other reply I doubt that any other notation software (except maybe SCORE that more or less does *not* have any notion of musical structure) will get you even close to what LilyPond does.

"The problem comes from Lilypond's bizarre assumption that at some point all the barlines in the score will line up". This indicates that you don't really understand what you're doing - which isn't a fault in itself but doesn't really match your tone.
LilyPond doesn't require all the barlines to align in order to be able to break a line, it only requires an arbitrary *moment* to align. If you have such a moment you can break lines, and the manual tells you how to achieve that.

HOWEVER:

tmp/frescobaldi-aXfsgv/tmpe9t0hz/document.ly:93:25: warning: barcheck failed at: 6515/211928

{ c8 d f e b c d16 f

| e8 b c d16 f e8 b c16 d }

This clearly indicates that you have a timing error *within a single voice*, which obviously stems from the fact that 800/898 don't match 735/713. One measure is 0,890868597 whole notes long and seven eight notes stretched by 735/413 equal 0,921610169 whole notes.
Your seven notes in that measures (and you'd have this in all the following measures if you'd applied barchecks as should be the minimal safety net in such complicated cases) simply don't match the length of your measure.

As long as you haven't sorted this out it doesn't make sense to discuss the issue of line breaking.
So please get your maths straight before ranting about LilyPond's sanity.

Urs