Re: How to change TabNoteHead

[Thomas Morley]

2013/7/6 Rachael Thomas Carlson <address@hidden>:
[...]
> Quick question: could you direct me to a resource that could tell me
> about this information and these functions?


Well, I can't answer quick or short.

There is no special or single resource for these functions. I wrote them ad hoc.
(Though, for my own purpose I did some much more complex overrides for
TabNoteHead 'stencil before. That helps. :) )

If you want to learn how to do it yourself, the "Extending Manual" and
the "Internals Manual" will become your friends.

Looking at
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/extending/simple-substitution-functions
and following the link
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/notation/substitution-function-examples
you'll find that \newTabNoteHead and \tweakTabNoteHead are
substitution-functions as described there.
Ok, you need to know the difference of \tweak and \override. IIRC,
it's explained in the NR.
( \tweak is more difficult to understand. Though David Kastrup put
some serious work on it. You'll probably see the advantages once you
have upgraded to the hopefully coming soon new stable.)

The "Internals" mention that TabNoteHead supports the text-interface:
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/internals/tabnotehead
(scroll down)

Some scheme/guile kowledge is useful.
There is a scheme-tutorial in "Extending".
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/extending-big-page#scheme-tutorial
And we have the 'scheme-sandbox' for experiments.
Let me say, that for first succesfull steps into the world of
custom-definitions and functions the needed amount of scheme-knowledge
is very low.
At some point of time you probably may notice that this little
tutorial is not enough for advanced codings.
Though there are several tutorials available online.
(I've  a copy of the guile-manual downloaded in case I need to work offline.)

Studying code-examples is very helpful:
Posts on this list.
LSR-snippets
Our source-code in /ly and /scm


And you need to practise what you've learned.
_Best_ practise is trying to answer all kind of user-requests. ;)


Hope that helps a bit,
  Harm