Re: Patch: figured bass. [Comments wanted]

[Jérémie Lumbroso]

Hi Han-Wen,

HWN> As per Jeremie's request, I tried to hack figured bass into Lily. The
HWN> implementation is kind of crude, but it more or less works:
Thanks  a  lot!!!  It'll  add  yet  another reason for me to
either  force somebody to compile the development release of
Lily for Windows, or install my own Red Hat system! :-)


HWN> \context FiguredBass \transpose c'' {
HWN>    <e! g >
HWN>    <f ais >
HWN> }
Looks  good A few remarks here, just for your knowledge: fi-
gures indicate a chord/note to play relatively to the one in
the  continuo  (a  non-stop  sequences of notes that will be
played by the left hand of a harpsichord, and as a tune on a
viola), thus meaning that there isn't any need for a \trans-
pose or \relative instruction.

This also means that there isn't an "extension" symbol: it's
exactly  like  the  _ in lyrics mode (graphically and in the
meaning).

HWN> will put

HWN>   5        6#
HWN>   3 nat    4
Well,it  wasn't  necessary  to inverse the accidental/number
order,  because  the  sharp should come before the six. I've
included changes to the Features Wish page about this. Also,
attached  is  an example of figured bass (note: in modern e-
ditions, the figures are placed BELOW the staff, not over as
I do).

HWN> and to be
HWN> completely honest, I also don't know how to use markup texts
HWN> effectively anyway).
Look at my attached example.


HWN> Finally, I've contemplated some kind of new syntax, maybe something
HWN> like

HWN>   \figures { [3 5!]4  [6+ 4]4 }
This syntax looks much more appealing, though i don't under-
stand why you put 4 after the brackets. The order of numbers
in a figures is important.  2,7,3 is different than 7,3,2 so
it isn't allow to write them in whichever order the typeset-
ter feels like.


HWN> but I wonder if it's needed; the chord syntax as demonstrated above is
HWN> also quite terse; as you can imagine, I'd like to keep syntax
HWN> extensions to a minimum.
The  chord  syntax that you first showed as the advantage of
being  coherent with the rest of the program. Never the less
directly  using  numbers makes it easier to typeset (I don't
want  to  have  to  figure out the intervals from c for each
number, even though it's quite basic, it will raise the pro-
bability  of  errors  in  the typeset). Numbers is closer to
what  figures  really  are,  and  it  explicitly  shows  the
non-transposibility and it's relativity.

Something  that's much needed in figured bass is an "extend"
symbol (exactly like putting a _ in lyrics).



Again,  thanks  for doing this, Mats and you have made using
Lilypond  a  much  more  feasible  task  (to me and probably
others).


-- 
Cheers,
 Jérémie                            mailto:address@hidden

cor1.zip
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