Re: [GLISS] verbifying music functions

[David Kastrup]

Keith OHara <address@hidden> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Keith OHara <k-ohara5a5a <at> oco.net> writes:
>> 
>> > Graham Percival <graham <at> percival-music.ca> writes:
>> >
>> >> Let's have a look at verbifying music functions.
>> >> [and special-cases that look just like music functions to the user]
>
>> >> balloonText       => \addBalloonText
>> 
>> I think that those commands basically retaining their last argument with
>> extras could be
>> 
>> \withBalloon
>> 
>> \withFootnote
>> 
>> but I am not particularly convinced that this really makes things easier
>> for people.
>
> It might make things easier, if the direction of the preposition reminds us 
> of the direction of application.
>
>    bes a c <b-\withBalloonTextAt #'(2 . 2) "H"> 
> (Apparently, and unsurprisingly, we all forgot which way balloonText
> works; it  affects the item before.)

Unless you use balloonGrob or so.  And it only works on notes inside of
chords and so forth and so on.

The original \footnote* commands were modeled after the balloon
commands, and I changed that since they were basically unusable.

One should now change the balloon commands to mimic the footnote
interface to make the redesign complete.

> But
>    \footnoteOn ...
> (Too bad we didn't keep this as postfix Having c4\withFootnote was more 
> natural. The case that looked funny was \breathe, because the breathing 
> sign is attached to the following note, presumably for proper spacing.)
>
>  c4 \breatheBefore g'8( e c e g4)

There were a few other funny non-note cases as well.  It also did not
work for attaching footnotes to articulations itself.  There actually
was one iteration trying to work this approach.  I agree that it had
some appeal for footnoting notes.  It was rather awfully inconsistent
and quite ugly for non-notes, so I definitely believe we arrived at the
best we can do.

> LilyPond's lenient (red-tape-free) grammar causes users (me, at least)
> trouble when they need to carefully study the manual examples what
> applies to what. (Try reading the docs on \balloonText !)

I remember Mike just copied those for the footnote interface, and I
flamed him like anything.  Definitely something that warrants bringing
into line with the footnote interface.

-- 
David Kastrup