Re: [Denemo-devel] optimizing staves or not

[Richard Shann]

On Tue, 2014-12-02 at 22:07 -0500, Ellen Schwindt wrote:
> About disappearing staves: Yes I do see a button appearing on the
> titles bar--and when you click it once it disappears. 

That is because the button when left-clicked executes the command, which
is a toggle, and so because it was on, it becomes off, and so the button
disappears because the Hide Staffs is off. This is not ideal, it should
change its label to say it is off, which would then enable you to turn
it back on with a click.

Actually - testing this just now, when I left click on the "Hide Staffs"
button it asks whether I want to repeat the command - and if I do it
then toggles the state, removing the button. A better label for this
button would be "Hidden Empty Systems", then its absence would imply the
normal case- everything typeset.

> If you click another one
I can only think you mean here "if I click on the Hide Staffs menu item
again" ??

>  (which I put there inadvertently by trying what I thought was a
> toggle command over and over again) it appears again. So I guess this
> must be a bug--not what was intended. 
> 
> 
> What I want to see are all the staves that are empty for a few bars
> printed anyway with whole-measure rests in them. For instance I have
> some measures where only two parts are playing. I want to see the
> other parts still in the print version with rests.

This is the default behavior.

>  What I am getting is those staves being hidden and the system being
> reduced to only the parts that have content for those bars. 

This is the behavior if you have Hide Staffs toggled on - a button
should be present on the titles bar to enable you to turn it off again.

If that is no what is happening to you, perhaps you could send the file
that is exhibiting the unwanted behavior. Looking at the LilyPond output
should reveal why LilyPond is not doing the default thing...
> 
> 
> About the ties-that way of doing it (using Laissez Vibrer) worked
> nicely and I think it will communicate what I want to the musicians. I
> didn't know, when I started the notation for the project, that each
> movement of this piece would end with an attacca to the next movement.
> If I had, I might have notated all of the movements as one movement.
> Is there an easy way to merge movements?

There isn't a single command - a script - to do this. I just
experimented with putting the cursor at the start (top right) and
dragging to the end (bottom left) - you can do this with the mouse now -
and so marking the entire movement, then Ctrl-c to copy.
Then in the destination movement I added an empty measure at the end of
the top staff and Ctrl-v did result in merged movements.
But there are several refinements that would be needed:

It would be good to refuse to do it on an un-saved score
It would be good to warn if the number of staffs in the two movements
were different.
It would be good to insert the initial time and key signatures before
the paste.

I've loggged a bug for this - thank you!

Richard