Help with understanding Beam properties

[Urs Liska]

Hi all,

in a project with 600+ short scores (mostly single systems) I have an issue with the beam/stem formatting, in so far as the stems tend to be too short when multiple beams are present (at least that's what the commissioners complained about). When looking at the documentation of Beam I am (as usual) intimidated by the relation of presumably powerful properties (especially the #'details) to the utter uselessness of the docstrings.

Could someone please point me to useful examples or explain to me in plain and sufficiently verbose language what the following Beam.details properties do (with about what value ranges)? I have the impression these could be very useful for my issue, but I can't imagine starting to find something by trial-and-error (it's too many properties, and I have hundreds of examples to apply them to):

• stem-length-demerit-factor
• secondary-beam-demerit
• stem-length-limit-penalty

as well as Stem.details:

• beamed-lengths
• beamed-minimum-free-lengths
• beamed-extreme-minimum-free-length
• lengths

I first tried #'beamed-lengths, but that is totally too static to serve as a global override. So I think the "demerit" properties of Beam look promising but I don't have any idea how to start with them.

Thanks
Urs