Re: ambitus questions

[Juergen Reuter]

On 11 Jul 2002, Laura Conrad wrote:

>
> I'm enjoying using the new ambitus engraver; it's fun having that
> information available by default, without having to do the stuff my
> incipit-writing script does to get it from the MIDI file.
>

Thanks.  It's always nice to hear that a new feature is actually used. :-)

> My first reaction looking at it is that it's a little too close to the
> clef.  Is this something that can be fixed either by default or by
> tuning some parameter?
>

Yes, this is one of a couple of known issues regarding spacing and
collision handling (see comments in lily/ambitus*.cc for details).  You
may try to tweak some of the space-alist values (search for "ambitus" in
scm/grob-description.scm), and (depending on breakAlignOrder) maybe also
the values of default-break-align-space-alist in scm/basic-properties.scm,
but I think I already played around with them with limited success.

> One of my plans for my website redesign is to have each piece have
> it's own page, with the incipit for each part.  To generate these
> automatically, I need a way to print the ambitus of a set of notes
> without printing all the notes.  I can think of some things to play
> with; has anyone solved the problem yet?

This currently would require to manually override properties "pitch-min"
and "pitch-max" in Voice.Ambitus just immediately before outputting the
grobs.  I think you can do something like that with the \outputproperty
directive, but I do not know the details of this command.

For the long term, I strive to implement support for automatically
generating incipits: the user simply defines the ancient clef, key etc.
via properties of an incipit "grob"; the music (by default from the start
of the piece to the first note, including lyrics) should automatically
copied by the incipit engraver, with the ancient clef, key, etc. applied
to them.  But this is just an idea for now; there are many unsolved
problems (e.g. copying music during the interpretation phase).

Greetings,
Juergen