Re: lilypond-user Digest, Vol 139, Issue 116

[Jay Anderson]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 7:40 PM, Patrick or Cynthia Karl <address@hidden> wrote:
> Second, it seems to me that this topic is much more complicated that it ought 
> to be.

Many seemingly simple things become complicated when you finally dig
into the details. The goal is to control the complexity.

> Finally, I still think that the following statement in section 1.4 of the 
> Notation documentation:
>
> volta   ... If the repeat is at the beginning of a piece, a repeat bar line 
> is only printed at the end of
>                 the repeat.
>
> needs modification because it is misleading.  It implies that if the repeat 
> is not at the beginning of
> a piece, a repeat bar will be printed at the beginning of the repeat.  That 
> implication is evidently false.

It's not false, but you'd need a deeper understanding of the system to
know why in this case it behaved differently than expected. I can see
how one might expect the different behavior:

First try: \musicA \break \repeat volta 2 { \musicB }
-> Result: Hmm I want a double bar instead of a single bar before the
break. I'll add it in.
Second try: \musicA \bar "||" \break \repeat volta 2 { \musicB }
-> Result: The double bar worked, but where did my initial repeat bar
go? This is very surprising.

One way to think of the '\repeat volta' command is as a short hand for
adding in the correct bar lines around a section of music (it does a
bit more than that as well). If you manually override the bar at one
end of the repeat then you get the overridden bar.

-----Jay