Re: [Denemo-devel] score wont render

[Richard Shann]

> On Tue, 2015-12-01 at 21:07 -0600, Jeremiah Benham wrote: 
> > A student of mine wrote this little composition exercise. For some
> > reason her score failed to render. See the attachment.
> > 
I ran Score->Check Score
It said more end braces than start braces
I clicked on the brace at the start of the staff it offered Edit Start
or End Brace, I chose End Brace
it offered Add an end brace (2->3) or Delete an end brace (2->1)
I chose delete and it typeset ok.


>  I am not sure how the user is supposed to know that something is
> wrong.
I guess you meant "how the user is supposed to know what is wrong"?

I would say that about 50% of the effort I'm currently putting in to
Denemo is to tackle this problem, so I'm pleased to see that for this
problem at least my efforts have paid off. 
The major upgrade to the Object/Staff/Movement/Score editors was also
intended to make the debug process easier, by making a much simpler
interface to seeing what you have in a score and modifying it. For
example the ability to double-click and then move the cursor
step-by-step through a bar with the Object Inspector open to see what is
in the bar in detail should help.


Another thing also aimed at the same problem are the commands to Delete
all measures from/before the cursor - with those you can chop a score in
half to see if it is a problem in one or the other half. This helps for
the case where the problem is something in the music content rather than
the score/movement/staff structure. It could be developed into a more
automated binary chop like git bisect.


For now, I think we could do with writing up a general guide as to what
to do, given an non-typesetting score. Something like:

1)Run Check Score
2)Delete each movement one at a time checking if it starts to typeset
3)Delete all the music in the bad movement check if it typesets
4)Delete each staff one at a time checking if it starts to typeset
5)Delete Directives on staff/voice/movement/score ...

each of these might lead to a chain of further actions, and the last one
is not so straight-forward as some directives would cause further
problems if deleted in isolation.

Of course, all this is different if you have the LilyPond output and can
read it, then we would need a "verbose" option where the LilyPond output
is peppered with %{ ...%} comments saying which Denemo Directive gave
rise to the output.

The other approach is to have continuous typesetting on (with just a
small context being typeset) so that people can think what it is they
just added that stopped it typesetting...

Richard