Re: Are Lilyponds beams thick enough?

[Valentin Petzel]

Hello other Valentin, hello David, hello Torsten.

The 0.55ss is taken to mimick the 1958 Bärenreiter edition, although I would 
rather take a slightly thinner Beam with slightly reduced height. And it 
depends strongly on the type of note. Note that an 8th profits quite a bit from 
the just slightly Beam, while the 16th notes look quite good with the 
defaults, but with anything smaller the defaults have to much whitespace 
within.

I’ve appended a slightly larger example with thickness from .48 to .55, and 
also with .5 and beam length from 85% to 100%.

In my opinion, .5 looks quite good both for 16ths and for smaller values, but 
for small note values it still has quite too much whitespace (while for 16th 
notes it’s quite beautiful). The closest to the Bärenreiter edition would 
probably be something at 0.5ss with a beam hight of slightly under 95%.

Anyway, no matter if Lilypond’s default is too thin or not, since this is one 
thing that is very dependent on the type of score, we could try to find other 
such things that are not well readable in some cases, and try to create 
multiple sets of sensible defaults for different use cases.

@David: I’m not really sure if that is a problem here. Rounding should only 
matter in the sense of rounding to pixels on a device, but here 0.5 is not 
much different to 0.48.

Regards,
Valentin

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