Re: cross staff notes collide

[Evan Laforge]

> I didn't say it was a hard to fix bug, I said it wasn't a bug and
> illustrated what another expensive product does, as an illustration of
> standard notation software layout practice.

Well, Sibelius makes you fix many things manually.  That's something
that makes Sibelius more time-consuming to use, so it's a point
against Sibelius, not a license to lower the bar everywhere.

All of this is pretty far afield, except I can take the opportunity to
point out that one of the ways lilypond is intentionally different
from other notation software is how much less manual fixing it makes
you do.

If you don't like the word "bug", perhaps we can agree to call it an
"opportunity for improvement."  I don't mind changing words if it
helps us stop getting distracted by other software :)

> When there are multiple
> non-chorded notes on a stave, they are regarded as being voiced.  It would
> be wrong for the software to guess what voicing you want - it would often
> get it wrong.  There are numerous examples of crossing voices, so simply
> guessing "hey, this note is above that one so we'll stem it up" would be
> wrong.

First of all, this is a cross-staff issue, not a voice issue.   I
don't know what you mean by "are regarded", but it sounds like an
internal implementation detail, because no \voice markup exists in the
score.  If it *were* about voices, there wouldn't be a problem,
because you would be using one of the \voiceN macros, which is
explicitly configuring stem direction.

I was actually talking about of flag collisions resulting from a cross
staff, not about voicing or guessing voicing, or crossing voices.  So
you're misunderstanding the original email.

Look at another way.  If a cross staff note causes the flags to
collide, then the composer is definitely not going to like it, and
will have to fix it.  Flipping the stem is the only fix, short of more
radical changes like removing the staff cross entirely.  If the
composer is definitely going to have to do it manually, why not save
the time and do it automatically?