FW: Agreed: my two-penneth

[Jeff Henrikson]

Oops, forgot to send this to the list also.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Henrikson [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2000 1:51 PM
To: Ben Tordoff
Subject: Agreed: my two-penneth


Accents and rehearsal marks are also very important to me.  Right now for me 
the former is bothersome and the latter are being done
by hand (like with a pencil).

Actually, I should generalize upon the rehearsal mark thing.  Not only are 
numbers for rehearsal marks not enough, I need to be
able to put arbitrary numbering schemes, for example

I
A
A_9
A_17
A_25
B
B_9
B_17
B_25
C

All in large square boxes.  The computer doesn't really need to understand 
this, and it's a comparatively short amount of labor to
do by hand.  But so far as I understand, I can't do the foo^"escape-to-TeX" 
thing unless I am anchoring to a note.  I need to
anchor to a barline in this and many other cases.

Again, this is a special case of a general problem: text anchoring is 
insufficient.  I need to be able to put different kinds of
text below, above, and way above the staff, (perhaps all three at once) and all 
these distinct from articulation marks, in such a
way that they don't interfere with one another.  I have not had any luck 
getting more than the simplest tempo marking up, unless
for example I go to the extent of creating a separate invisible staff and 
putting s2^"my happy text" all over the place.  I got
complicated jazz chord changes to print that way.

Is this architecturally difficult, or has it just not been thought of?  To see 
examples of heavy dependence on text, look at any
percussion music (eg, for wind band or modern orchestra).

How difficult would it be to just have a special kind of invisible staff 
explicitly for text markings that would be kinder to the
layout than the usual defaults?  It would be nicer for extracting parts since 
you only want one rehearsal mark on the score, but
always when printing parts.

I can explain this further if it isn't clear.


Jeff Henrikson