Re: Lily and Plainsong

[Mark Hindley]

Jurgen,

I have spent the weekend trying out your syntax. I actually found it
less confusing than I had feared. Of course you are right that the
different neumes do not have a strict implication of different
durations. I suppose that to use nominal durations as an underlying encoding 
will just
store up problems in the future (? midi performance). Might it be
worth having the neume duration as a crotchet rather than a breve
which will remove for the need for a\breve at the beginning?

When you talk of needing a new context for ligatures, do you mean a context as
in \context Voice or as in \notes{}, \lyrics{} etc?

It has occurred to me that we could actually make do with only 2 ligature 
syntaxes. One that requests a
porrectus and one for all the other paired neumes, the code working out
what to print based on which note was higher and the note types. Is
this quest for simplicity going too far? It is certainly common to
other parts of lily where the `knowledge' is embedded in the code
rather than expecting the user necessarily to supply it.

eg

g \ligature b                           Podatus
b \ligature a                           Flexa
g \ligature \plica b                    Epiphonus
\virga b \ligature \plica a             Cephalicus
\virga b \porrectus a \ligature b       Porrectus

This cold even do a Torculus as I don't believe that g \ligature a
\ligature g could be anything else. (Have I missed something here?)

If you also allow a shorthand (say + and =) for the 2 request types then I 
think the syntaxt gets quite
compact and easily usable.

Have you actually started any of the implementation yet?

My quilisma looks much the same, although it is a little flatter

Hope you had a good weekend away.

Best wishes,

Mark