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From: | Simon Albrecht |
Subject: | Re: Place text next to rehearsal mark, or with left edge over barline if there is none |
Date: | Mon, 10 Jul 2017 19:35:02 +0200 |
On 10.07.2017 15:41, Wols Lists wrote:
On 09/07/17 21:20, Simon Albrecht wrote:On 09.07.2017 21:21, Wols Lists wrote:Maybe, but placing all related marks one after the other is just as semantically correct as placing them one on top of the other ...That’s nonsense, and it is for the same reason that it’s not a trivial decision to loosen horizontal alignment in general.Why's it nonsense? "semantics" to me means "meaning", and if I see a bunch of marks grouped together, they mean (to me at least) that they all apply together. The fact that they are sequential rather than stacked is irrelevant.
In tempo marks, horizontal position is related to semantics. If you place the tempo indication over a different moment, it means something different. What’s so hard to get about that? Or are you suggesting spreading the notes out by the entire width of the MetronomeMark? (I can’t think of tempo indications so short that this wouldn’t be ridiculous.)
If you shift a tempo indication a tiny bit to the side, it makes no difference. But if it’s a slightly larger bit, such as the width of a quarter note, then the tempo change applies to a different moment. And preservation of semantic information (almost) always has to take precedence over elegant layout.Finally, these two statements are contradictory: A real engraver who wanted to stick to those conventions would presumably shift the note to the right wasted white space is high on my list of prioritiesHow come? Shifting the notes to the right wastes maybe one note-width of one stave. Stacking marks on top of each other wastes an entire line of text - bad enough in portrait music but appalling in landscape (where saving space tends to be extremely important - the music is only A5 to start with!)It’s obvious that your use case is special in its extremely tight restrictions on paper size and page turns. So I’m afraid you have to lower your expectations as to how well Lily will cope with that special situation in difficult circumstances. I assume you’re aware of possibilities like \paper { page-count = 2 system-count = 10 systems-per-page = 5 } – your use case might take benefit from specifying _all three_ of these.And this would gain me what? Loads of wasted white space? On a bandstand that's probably not *too* bad, but I was recently playing and a single sheet of A4 was a nightmare!
Look, I understood from your previous e-mails that your usecase sometimes requires fitting the music on exactly two pages of A5 so they may be used for marching. Is that correct? If you face such a situation and Lily by default spaces the music out to three pages, you can specify page-count to force it on two pages. In such tight constraints, the spacing algorithms often produce better results if you also specify the total number of staves as well as the number of staves on each page. If you have trouble applying that to your real-world example, maybe try to understand it better by reading it up in the Notation Reference, or ask back with an actual example.
Lilypond claims to be "a system for producing beautiful music". The reality seems to be it's a system for producing standard orchestral music. Fact is, there are a lot of traditions out there besides the traditional western orchestra, and by default lilypond seems to have great headaches handling what - to a lot of people - is perfectly normal music typesetting. Take for instance marks! I can't remember why I had the four marks that I mentioned earlier, but a large minority of the pieces I play will have three - a rehearsal mark, a tempo mark, and a melody name. Oh - and given that they typically go up to a rehearsal mark somewhere near S or P, and I've known AA and beyond, I don't think cramming them in to two pages will work :-) At the end of the day, people want to use lilypond to produce beautiful music - like me! But to argue that the orchestral *tradition* is "the final arbiter" of what is right or wrong is simply going to put peoples' backs up.
How did I suggest that a certain tradition was the ‘final arbiter’? The final arbiter is always legibility, and it so happens that traditional engravers of orchestral parts have achieved a very high standard in legibility. Producing high-quality parts is difficult enough for an orchestral setting where parts are normally larger than A4, there is no wind, no rain, and page turns are possible at appropriate locations. I totally accept yours as a valid use case, and still you have to admit that the constraints you cite are making the task much more difficult. You can only cram so much music on a page while keeping optimal legibility, and if you try to exceed that amount, Lily will choke. There are countless possibilities to deal with this situation, but no magical ones to solve all problems without drawbacks.
Face it. I (and the OP) are trying to use lilypond. It's not making our lives easy, because it comes from a different tradition to us. And to claim that we're wrong because we're experienced musicians who've never seem music like you describe (and let's face it, I very rarely see music like you describe) doesn't make you look good. Different traditions, different expectations. I know lilypond is a tricky tool if you don't work with its assumptions. But don't tell us we're wrong just because we're different.
Please reread what I wrote: ‘It’s obvious that your use case is special in its extremely tight restrictions on paper size and page turns. So I’m afraid you have to lower your expectations as to how well Lily will cope with that special situation in difficult circumstances.’ Does that statement discriminate against the expertise of wind band musicians? I don’t think so.
Do you maybe have an example of what you’re trying to reproduce and how Lily fails at it? This whole discussion is way too inconcrete.
Best, Simon
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