Re: Lily and petrucci (whaddapair!)

[Mats Bengtsson]

...

> In summary, what I'm looking for are:
> -new ways of keeping track of note values which are based less on
> measures than on finding
> a good place to split barless scores, but which still align notes
> vertically in a method that makes reading and understanding easier.
> -a better ancient font which benefits from the balance and placement
> rules obvious in the better of original sources
> -a better set of ancient font clefs, at the very least allowing the
> mensural clefs to be placed on any line. (placement of the Cclef on the
> third space up would be interesting... but not something I'm asking for)
> and the possibility of a new clef set which is based on Petrucci's
> fonts.
> -a mode that is useful in both ancient and modern font settings, which
> allows either {entering music without consideration of barlines and
> splits compound (bar-crossing) values automagically when needed} or
> {entering music with ~'s which are taken like barchecks now: suggestions
> in barred layouts, and count-ligitures in barless layouts} resulting in
> a single input producing a proper output in barless/non-tie and
> barless/tie-over-bar modes.
> -ligiture braces and coloration grouping indicators, which place
> 'rectangular braces' (like truplet brackets without numbers, and
> indicated by start and stop, rather than tuplet values) over notes that
> had been in ligitures and 'flip' displayed forms of notes where
> coloration is wanted. (Maybe a \color variable to set when using color
> printer output? 8^)
> 
> and of course,
> - things like the number of lines should actually be displayed properly!
> 
> I suppose this should be queued up for 1.6 or 1.7?

I'm just to take off to Norway to play string quartet for a week
and don't have time for a long answer. However, from a quick 
look at your wish list, it seems that most of this is already
available or can easily be implemented using a few lines of
inline Guile code. For the bar lines, take a look at the 
properties barNonAuto, timing and barAlways (combined with 
defaultBarType = ""). Note that Lilypond only will consider
line breaks where there's a bar line (that's why barAlways=##t
may be useful).

Changing the durations of notes can be done using Guile code,
take a look at input/test/smart-transpose.ly and 
input/test/reverse-music.ly to get some inspiration.

For the clef position, you can get whatever you want, see
the reference manual.

For the number of staff lines, have you looked at
input/regression/number-staff-lines.ly?

To change the layout of note heads and other symbols, some
Metafont hacking is needed. For the square symbols, this 
should be easy even if you don't know Metafont. Take a look
at mf/feta-bolletjes.mf and play around with the parameters.
Erase all old feta20.tfm and feta20.*pk files and use
tex testfont
to get a table over the feta20 font.

I hope someone else can fill in more details and the questions
I didn't cover.

  /Mats