Re: [proposal] easy triplets and tuplets - Draft 2

[Jonathan Wilkes]

> Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2012 20:33:18 +0200
> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: [proposal] easy triplets and tuplets - Draft 2
> Message-ID: <address@hidden>
> Content-Type: text/plain
> 
> Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>>>  I haven't seen quadruplets in the wild, so that seems like a
>>>  stretch.
>> 
>>  They are quite common in late-romantic piano music.
>> 
>>>  When they occur, it seems audacious to assume they are 6/4.  More
>>>  likely than not, I would expect them to be 3/4, like if you have 4
>>>  notes on a halfmeasure in a 6/8 setting.
>> 
>>  The normal setting is to have four notes in a full 3/4 bar.
> 
> That would be \times 3/4 rather than \times 6/4, right?
> 
> -- 
> David Kastrup

I understand the reasons for \tuplet and its syntax, but I don't really get
the point of \triplet and friends.

I thought this thread started with the complaint about having to a) explicitly
write whatever syntax means "this next stuff between the brackets is a
triplet", b) writing the bracket, c) writing the "stuff", d) writing the 
closing bracket,
and finally e) having to reload the syntax shotgun for the next triplet.  This 
gets
extremely tedious for long strings of triplets, and reloading the
shotgun with 11 characters (\triplet {}) instead of 14 (\tuplet 3/2 {}) doesn't 
really
address that problem.
I want to tell Lilypond it's time for a bunch of triplets, write the triplet 
pitch names,
then tell Lilypond I'm done.  I'm not typically counting how many durations of
a kind there are coming up in the stuff I'm about to enter into a score (and I 
_shouldn't_
have to use my error-prone brain to calculate the sum total durations for the
make-moment thingy when the durations that add up to the total are going to be
cordoned off for Lilypond to inspect when I compile).  In the cases where
"\tuplet x/y {}" would be tedious to keep writing I want syntax that will allow 
me to
put bookends around my entire block of triplets and have Lilypond do the work 
for me--
typing 3 fewer characters _each_ tuplet group doesn't help much, especially when
everyone's just going tocopy/paste that syntax anyway.

-Jonathan