Re: transition between full-length and shortened stems - please discuss

[Graham Percival]

On 2/13/11, Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> This is the first part of a series of changes to the stems and flags.
> The suggested change is small, but in my opinion important.

Thanks you for creating such an excellent report on the matter.  You
took the time to create two alternative solutions, with pdfs to
illustrate their behaviour, full lilypond source code so that others
could easily test your patches (and presumably fiddle with the
constants to experiment if they wished, etc.  I'm very sorry that I
missed this the first time around -- this was an absolutely
outstanding preparation for a well-reasoned discussion.

I would encourage everybody to look at Janek's first email in detail,
if you haven't already -- this really was well-done.  The only
possible critique might be the lack of a Reitveld issue, but given the
simplicity of the two alternate patches (and the sheer fact that there
*are* two alternate patches), I don't think that a Reitveld issue
would really help.

If you missed it, here's his original email:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2011-02/msg00391.html


As for the specifics... I'm afraid to say that I have no opinion on
the matter.  It might sound very strange to hear this, but I really
have no "eye" for typography or engraving.  At first I thought that
you had mistakenly used the same pdf in both directories -- in fact,
even when I lined up the BWM 861 pdfs exactly and alt-tab-switched
between the two, it still took me about 20 seconds to notice the
differences!

I see my role in the developer community as a "manager" -- somebody
who helps the actual workers do their jobs.  I must admit that I have
failed spectacularly with Janek in the past week, and I shall write
more about that later tonight... but I've got it in the system now,
and I will make a fuss in 24 hours if nobody starts discussing this.

Janek - you have my full confidence on this matter, and FWIW, I would
be happy pushing whichever patch you personally think is better.
(hopefully this will prompt other people to complain, and therefore
discuss the options)

Cheers,
- Graham