Re: Are Lilyponds beams thick enough?

[Urs Liska]

Am Dienstag, den 26.05.2020, 13:18 +0200 schrieb 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.

This is something we (especially Kieren MacMillan and I) have long had
on our plate, to be realized as an openLilyLib package. 
https://github.com/openlilylib/stylesheets is what currently is there
in that package, but this doesn't have much to do with what you are
after here.

What we would like to do is to provide an infrastructure where you can
define stylesheets in a presumably hierarchical manner where you can
load styles for example with something like
  \loadStylesheet peters.piano.landscape
or so.

Another package that implements something very close to what we're
discussing here is https://github.com/openlilylib/notation-fonts which
lets you load default stylesheets for supported notation fonts.
See for example 
https://github.com/openlilylib/notation-fonts/blob/master/fonts/haydn-default.ily
which happens to include a setting for beams (0.7 because the Haydn
font really is a special case).

Urs

> 
> @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