Re: Settings for automatic beam slope

[Urs Liska]

Am 20.11.2015 um 12:19 schrieb Andrew Bernard:

Hi Urs,

Im my work I set almost every beam manually (fiddly and time consuming, but worthwhile).

Well, the usual discussion of automatic engraving. Of course we hope that one day LilyPond will simply produce perfect output. But OTOH "perfect" may be quite different things for different people ...

In the current case I don't have a serious problem with setting the beam manually, but in general I prefer automatic solutions because setting Beam.positions makes the music *completely* untransposable (or able to use a different clef).

Some useful functions I wrote:

setBeamPos =

#(define-music-function

  (left right)

  (number? number?)

  "Manually set beam position for next group."

  #{

    \once \override Beam.positions = #(cons left right)

  #})

setBeamPosAll =

#(define-music-function

  (left right)

  (number? number?)

  "Manually set beam position for following groups."

  #{

    \override Beam.positions = #(cons left right)

  #})

These are of course useful shorthands, but as said I want to understand the default behaviour and automatic settings.

But how about the beam damping factor that can be set globally? Is that what you are seeking? Setting beam.damping globally as follows is useful for when you do actually want all flat beams, something I also need a lot:

\override Beam.damping = #+inf.0

This was what I tried first. But AFAICS this can only be used to make steep beams flatter, not to make a completely horizontal beam steeper.

I am not sure why your example is flat by default.

I *think* there's a general rule that flat beams are preferrable, but somehow I have the impression that LilyPond falls back to horizontal beams wheneve it doesn't manage to calculate a proper slope.

So that's part two of my question: Is that flat appearance intended, a bug or simply a limitation of LilyPond's current automatic capabilities?

Urs

Andrew

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