AW: incipit and SystemStartBrace/Bracket etc.

[Stefan Slapeta]

> 
> With some trial and error I managed in the D.5.1 ancient music template to
> move the SystemStartBracket (using #'extra-offset) towards the end of the
> incipit so that it is placed at the beginning of the modern notation.
> Attached an image. I'm sure with \startStaff and \stopStaff I can tweak
> the
> looks of the incipit even more to my liking.

Do you mean putting a space between incipit and real score?
At first I thought that would be a good idea but later I realized that's not
what most of today's editions do (if this is of any interest...)

I put together some incipit examples of common editions together, just if
anybody is interested:
http://www.slapeta.com/files/incipit_samples.pdf


> But the placing of the
> SystemStartBracket is tricky, because the layout of the first system might
> change, and then the bracket would print in a wrong place.
> 

So that's some kind of hack as well :-)

> Another aproach (recenly but also earlier mentioned in mailing list) would
> be
> embed \score inside instrumentName, but then the vertical alignment is a
> bit
> tricky, dependend on extent of lyrics in the incipit, etc.
> 

Yes. The best solution so far (for this approach) is assigning the text
directly to notes (via _"...") because it ties these two things together
very tightly, which makes the vertical displacement of the incipit very
small.
For me, that's something I can live with. However, if somebody wants to
produce a professional score...

> Isn't there a more direct way to get a systemstart in the middle of a
> score?
> Using some \systemStart or \restart command? (Many years I used mup, which
> has a restart command to do just that.) Clefs/Time/Key signatures could
> then
> also automatically be printed again without having to force fullsize clef
> changes etc. I'm already trying to add this option myself (delving into
> scm/
> and lily/) but could use some help/hints .... :)

A \restart command would be ok if it really fulfils all the intentions that
need a hack at the moment:

- Incipits normally have a different clef, notation, time signature and  
  (very important!!) a much tighter spacing than the real score
- Ambitus, system start delimiter + bracket, bar counting and maybe some  
  other things must be available for the modern score and suppressed for
  the incipit.

And there is one more annoying issue: at the moment, every incipit staff
must have the same duration so that you have to insert useless skip
sequences for padding of shorter durations.
This is firstly very time-consuming and secondly hard to understand for
somebody who is new to this tool.

Thus, an even better solution would be to have an own \incipit { ... }
syntax that does everything automatically: using clef/time
signature/notation/... provided there and closing/aligning all the incipit
staffs over different voices. And it should let away such things like
ambitus etc.
Maybe this could also be handled in a more generic way, just ideas...

Thoughts?

Stefan