Re: Syntax explanations

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

Am Mittwoch, 11. Juni 2008 schrieben Sie:
> When I first started working on chords.itely I wrote something like this
> for chordmode chords.  However, by design we don't do this in the NR.

Ouch, because for a reference manual, I find it extremely useful to show the 
basics in one table with all available options.

For example, the \! to break an extender in figured bass IS mentioned in the 
latest GDP version, but its very well-hidden and badly explained that I would 
have never realized what it did unless I read the parser.yy.

> Although this would be a clear definition of the syntax, the syntax can
> change with future versions.  Therefore, we try to keep all of the syntax
> in the snippets, so convert-ly can update the documentation automatically.

Actually, while writing chord support in musicxml2ly I found this extremely 
annoying, because I simply couldn't easily find all the different postfixes 
for some kinds of chords. Basically, the implementation of musicxml2ly is 
based on trial-and-error rather than on documented behavior.

For example, to create a hald-diminished, I found out that I could 
use 'dim5m7', but that took me some trying.

The other thing that I found purely by luck was that while you can simply 
write c1 for the C major chord, if you want to add or remove steps, you'll 
have to use c1:5.3. This is never explicitly said in the docs, only used 
implicitly in one snippet, where you will find it once you have found the 
solution, but it doesn't help you in finding the solution.

> In the past, there has been a call for a full syntax diagram for LilyPond. 
> Such a diagram should come directly from the parser, IMO.

Actually, I'm not asking for a full-fletched grammar, which  would be 
counter-productive for a user-manual, because that cannot be understood in 
half a second. When I write e.g. figured bass, I want all (or at least the 
most important) commands in one place, so I can easily look up what I'm 
looking for. I don't want to search through three web pages.

> P.S.  Reinhold, the available chordmode modifiers are shown in a list in
> the GDP docs.  If the explanation isn't clear, please let me know.  Thanks.

Yes, I used that, but was not sure whether these were all modifier (i.e. how 
can I explicitly create a major chord? I was looking for this when c:.3 
wouldn't work). Also, I wasn't so sure how the modifiers interact with the 
step numbers given afterwards. Maybe you can take a look at the musicxml2ly 
code ( 
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=lilypond.git;a=blob;f=scripts/musicxml2ly.py;h=5b2a59ccb6234ace564191e3cbe59c6ac4523341;hb=HEAD#l1319
 
starting at code line 1319)
and tell me if I used the correct modifiers/numbers for all the chords defined 
in MusicXML (http://www.musicxml.org/dtds/direction.html, search for "Triads" 
to get to the list of defined chord names).

Cheers,
Reinhold


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
email: address@hidden, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial and Actuarial Mathematics, TU Wien, http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/
 * K Desktop Environment, http://www.kde.org, KOrganizer maintainer
 * Chorvereinigung "Jung-Wien", http://www.jung-wien.at/