Re: film score example

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 13/09/13 05:54, Curt wrote:
> - Hairpins are surprisingly difficult.  Most instruments do not have a natural
>         decay, so hairpins don't necessarily start or end right at the note
>         boundaries.  It's necessary to use "fake voices" in these cases.  Even
>         with this, it didn't support having a decrescendo end at the Fine bar -
>         I had to make it end at a note value before the Fine bar.  And
>         if you have ties over these fake voices, you have to know about
>         \set tieWaitForNote = ##t

This is for me one of the single most frustrating things with Lilypond. 
Hairpins that don't begin or end with a notehead or rest are such a typical 
musical notation, so easy to do by hand or with a WYSIWYG score editor, and 
really annoying and finnicky to do with Lilypond.

> - The alignment of the flat sign in text markup like "Clarinet in Bb" is 
> difficult.
>         I gave up on this one because the approach to make it look right felt 
> too
>         hard-coded.

I "solved" this in some scores by defining an entity \Bflat that was the B 
combined with the flat sign in the right relative position and size.  Imperfect 
but doable.

> - It was extremely hard to specify a subito dynamic right after a hairpin.  This
>         is a relatively common use-case, but I had to pull in a pretty 
> complicated
>         scheme function, and modify it, to make it work as expected.  This one 
> requirement
>         probably took around six hours.

If I recall right, doesn't this stem from the fact that default minimum hairpin 
length is expected to _include_ the dynamic mark's width?  So any dynamic mark 
which contains more than 1 letter can mess up the display of the hairpin (I've 
even seen cases where the hairpin itself was so narrow it was pretty much a 
single vertical line -- the angle between its arms was a full 180 degrees!).

I think the solution here is probably that there be a real minimal length for 
the hairpin alone -- this matches what one sees in e.g. the Henle hand-engraved 
scores, where (if you remember the video that was posted) the very smallest 
hairpins are not hand-engraved but stamped with a custom die.