Re: Stem direction with ties

[David Kastrup]

"Phil Holmes" <address@hidden> writes:

> Elaine Gould, in "Behind Bars" has many examples of where the stems of
> tied notes do not have the same direction, so typographically we
> should accept that it's not standard notation.  As David said, if it
> bothers you \stemUp is a trivial command.

Well, the art of typography is not to distract from the content.  As
beamed notes (and multi-voice notations) show, people don't really rely
on a fixed relation between stem direction and pitch for reading music.

On the one hand, this means that the stem direction switch in connection
with ties might be less disconcerting to the average reader than Per
considers it to be.

On the other hand, it means that switching the stem direction in some of
those cases, like Per proposes, does not seem to have significant
disadvantages attached to its probably comparatively small advantages.

A small net win is still a win, and typography is concerned with a lot
of small net wins.  I doubt we'll spend a lot of energy on this one in
the near future, but that does not mean that there are cases where such
a consideration would not have benefits.

-- 
David Kastrup