Re: voiceOne and oneVoice

[David Kastrup]

Jean Abou Samra <jean@abou-samra.fr> writes:

> Le 30/09/2021 à 10:04, Valentin Petzel a écrit :
>> Hello Silvain,
>>
>> Note that I specified \voice number, so number is not part of the name, but 
>> an
>> argument. But Lilypond does (similar to TeX) interpret \command1 as \command 
>> 1
>> (which is the reason why numbers cannot be part of variable names, also
>> similar to how \commandA\commandB do not need to be separated, as well as
>> \command{ ... } is possible).
>>
>> This is the exact reason why I am suggesting this option: For instead of
>> having a fixed number of commands \voiceOne, \voiceTwo, ... you simply have 
>> to
>> say \voice1 (\voice 1), \voice2 and you can thus easily use an arbitrary
>> number of voices.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Valentin
>
> There is also the to me annoying concept
> that \voiceTwo is usually the third voice.

It's the second of two or three voices, the second or third of four or
five voices and so on.

\voiceOne, \voiceThree, \voiceFive are the first, second, third from the
top while \voiceTwo, \voiceFour, \voiceSix are the first, second, third
from the bottom.

The problem is numbering them consecutively in the first place rather
than separately from top and bottom.

Which is why

\voices 1,3,4,2 << ... \\ ... \\ ... \\ >>

allows you to defuse what \\ does in the manner you like.

> Perhaps we could make \voice n format the
> n-th voice in the normal order?

We couldn't without knowing the total number of voices.  Even then, at
least with an odd number of voices, the choice of whether to do the
middle voice stem-up or stem-down may well depend on the material in
question.

-- 
David Kastrup