Re: Update template for ancient music transcription

[Stefan Slapeta]

Juergen Reuter wrote:
> Instead, my idea of the ultimate way of incipit creation is to have an 
> \incipit scheme function that automatically creates an incipit for a 
> given music expression.  
[...]

I think this would be quite complicated as you have a lot more of 
configuration than just setting a key signature etc.
The incipit shall give an idea of how original sources look like, and it 
certainly must have the complete range of functionality available from 
printing ancient music.

> As the term "system start delimiter" indicates, this graphical object 
> ("grob") can only appear in the beginning of a system.  Template D.5.1 
> therefore uses the sequence
This was not my question.
System start delimiter and bracket are suppressed for the first system 
because they don't apply to what we today call "incipit" (as there were 
no scores with more than one staff at this time).
However, in lilypond, after they have been made invisible they are not 
printed in all of the succeeding systems, either (where they should be). 
And that's the problem.

> There are different opinions as to what a "breve" corresponds to in 
> modern notation, also depending on the particular style and composer.
> Currently, the mapping from the "\time x/y" directive to the time 
> signature symbols is (essentially) hardcoded, as shown in the manual 
> Sect. 2.8.1, "Ancient time signatures".  If you need another glyph for 
> a given time signature (e.g. for "\time 2/1"), you can use the \markup 
> feature to directly access the glyph that you want (I remember there 
> was an example somewhere in the documentation showing how this works, 
> but I can not find it right now).  Alternatively, be aware of the 
> "\times <fraction> <music expression>" function that lets you multiply 
> the durations of your (possibly complete) score such that the time 
> signature will perfectly fit.
AFAICS, this is not in any way related to ancient time signatures in 
lilypond as this problem is the same with modern ones (i.e. for 2/4 it's 
the same).
However, maybe I should indeed use the \times workaround.

> This is a well-known problem.  Reasons: (1) There are some "\skip" 
> directives that are used as workarounds for other problems (as 
> documented in D.5.1); some of these "\skip"s unfortunately produce 
> additional horizontal space.  (2) Incipits typically consists of notes 
> with rather long durations.  Since lily internally assumes the same 
> time base as for the notes after the incipit, these notes are widely 
> spaced due to their long durations (in particular, lily's spacing 
> engine considers the maximal occuring note duration *per score* for 
> its spacing calculations).
Maybe another application for the \times hack in order to reduce 
durations ... I'll try that.

> Strange.  They do not appear in D.5.1 of the online-manual (see 
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.11/Documentation/user/lilypond/Ancient-notation-templates). 
> Can you confirm that you observe a different behavior on your machine 
> than what is on the lilypond web page?  If yes, maybe you are using a 
> version of lily that has a corresponding bug?

Solved. See my updated template.

> > 5)
> > Using \remove "Forbid_line_break_engraver", the lines can break also 
> > when notes overlap into the next bar.
>
> If this works well (have you tested it?), D.5.1 probably should be 
> modified accordingly (including a comment why you do this).  As a side 
> note, setting barAlways to ##t gives lily more chances to break the 
> lines, thus typically resulting in wider spacing (which is mostly 
> undesirable for ancient music notation).
This works very well.

> Somewhere else, you write that you have solved this in the meantime?  
> If so, we may add it to D.5.1 (with a corresponding comment).
Solved. See my updated template.

> > can I achieve somehow that the ambitus is printed at a certain place? 
> > (i.e. after the incipit!)
>
> No, this is currently not possible, since the ambitus is determined 
> once per score.  Maybe Han-Wen is willing to implement kind of a 
> "\resetAmbitus" feature, if someones sponsors it.

It doesn't make much sense to print the ambitus as part of the incipit, 
using ancient clefs etc., don't you think?

Stefan