Re: Instrumental Group Names in Score

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, 3 Jan 2008 13:50:14 -0500
Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden> wrote:

> > And you don't need explanations.
> 
> I disagree!
> 
> 1. If these are meant in any way to be instructive (like most, if
> not all, of the LSR!), then there *must* be internal documentation.

They're not.  They're supposed to be useful.

> > Do normal LaTeX users ever look at the details of packages?
> 
> I do... but then again, I'm not "normal".

I don't.  As long as
  \usepackage{setspacing}
  ...
  \doublespacing
and
  \usepackage{amsmath}

do their job, I don't care how they get \weird-math-symbol to
work.

> > Do normal C++ programmers ever look at the source code of the
> > libraries they use?  Ok, in occasional circumstances yes, but
> > generally not.
> 
> All programmers *should* look more at the packages/libraries they  
> use... especially in C++, which is one of the cruftiest languages  
> I've ever seen.

I've used Qt a whole lot in the past year, but I've never glanced
at the source cde.  Whoops.  Come to think of it, I've never
looked at the libc source code.  Or the kernel source code.  Oops.

Unless you're programming the kernel or libc, *some* level of
abstraction is necessary.  Now, we could quibble about at which
point one should draw the line -- maybe we shouldn't look at libc,
but we _should_ look at Qt... but this is getting away from the
main point.


> > At laest, not for what I'm thinking.
> 
> What *are* you thinking?  ;-)

See attached files.

They worked in 2.4 or something like that.  I make no claims that
they work now, since I'm not a composer any more I haven't kept
them up-to-date.  And I just noticed that \flegato is defined
twice.


Now, init-defs.ly  should be split up.  A lot of it are dynamic (well,
expressive-dynamic) marks.  They don't belong in lilypond proper, but I
could imagine them working well as a package in LSR -- ie the
\flegato \mpdolce \niente

I think that some of the \setTextDecr has made its way into lilypond.
Or maybe not.  Somebody would need to investigate this.

Clearly the \tempoMark command does *not* belong in the "expresive
dynamics" package.  So that would be moved to somewhere else.

All these commands might have nicer versions.  Again, I haven't touched
these files in years.

A "normal" user can then
\include "expressive-dynamics.ly"
in his .ly file and use (or not use) any of those commands.  Sure,
adding the \include probably makes the compiling 0.01 seconds longer,
but IMO it's worth it.


Now, init-layout.ly  is a more personal style -- I hate the silly C
time signature instead of 4/4, when I use glissandi they tend to be
only one or two semitones, so I make them thicker to be more visible.
And maybe one or two other changes.

Users can't
\include "init-layout.ly"
without changing their own scores, unlike init-defs.ly.  But such
"style sheets" might still be useful.


If somebody wants to investigate this, I could send you all my stuff
privately.  I think it *would* be useful to collect this stuff, and
have a bunch of users contribute to the same packages.  But I'm not
doing this myself.

Cheers,
- Graham

init-defs.ly
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init-layout.ly
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