Re: lilypond manual intro

[David Kastrup]

Graham Percival <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sat, Sep 08, 2012 at 06:20:09PM +0100, Trevor Daniels wrote:
>> 
>> Karl Berry wrote Friday, September 07, 2012 11:45 PM
>> 
>> > The first example there looks good (and is in fact what I sent her).
>> > But then the second example, instead of showing how to typeset other
>> > kinds of notation, goes into \relative.  Is this really the next thing
>> > people want from a tutorial?  I would have expected to see how to choose
>> > a different clef or time signature or type of note or ... anything but
>> > that.
>> 
>> Again, a reasonable point to make, but as pretty well all the following 
>> examples are in relative mode and as this is usually the best one for
>> beginners to use it seemed best to get this out of the way early, rather
>> than teaching absolute entry only to ditch it a few pages later.
>
> Yes.  If anything, I think we should consider making the very
> first example \relative.
> (I'd also like to have an \absolute keyword so that doc examples
> using it could be more explicit, but that would need to wait until
> we have a good way to discuss syntax changes)

Well,

absolute =
#(define-music-function (parser location m) (ly:music?)
  #{ \transpose f f $m #})

\relative c' { c f b \absolute { c' d' e' } c }

It is not impervious against notename changes (I think I will at some
point work on the notename language of #{...#} to correspond to the
language at the time of definition rather than of use), but if required,
it could be written equivalently in Scheme.

I just don't think it a fabulous idea.

-- 
David Kastrup