Re: Contemporary music documentation

[Trevor Daniels]

Carl Sorensen wrote Sunday, September 06, 2009 3:46 AM

> On 9/5/09 7:12 PM, "Graham Percival" <address@hidden> 
> wrote:
> > Hmm.  This could be a meaningless semantic quibble, or it could 
> > be
> > something that's fundamental to the docs, GLISS, and development
> > in general.  Is a change to the autobeaming, done via
> > \overrideAutoBeamSettings, consititude a "tweak"?  Offhand, I'd
> > say "yes".
>
> No, I don't think they are tweaks. That is a defined command to 
> achieve a
> particular behavior.
>
> In my opinion, a call to \overrideBeamSettings is fundamentally 
> equivalent
> to a call to \hideNotes.   It's specific defined LilyPond syntax.

Another way of assessing this is to look at
the complexity of the command.  The old auto-beam-
setting commands were certainly specific and did
not use \override or \set but they were so difficult
to get right few people managed it without help.
I'd call them tweaks.  The new \overrideBeamSetting
commands are a little simpler, but not by much, and
I think many users will also struggle with them.
I'd call these tweaks too.  Both differ fundamentally
from \hideNotes and similar commands in that Scheme
syntax is exposed to the user.  This is the criterion
I would use in separating tweaks from non-tweaks. I
think it might be the criterion users would use too.

Trevor