Re: extended auto beaming

[Erik Sandberg]

On Wednesday 28 July 2004 03.30, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > > Within a 10/8 beat, I want auto beaming to divide a bar into
> > > 3+3+2+2 eights.  How can I do that?  Looking into the docs it
> > > rather seems to me that this isn't possible which would be a
> > > pity...
> >
> > You can't.
> >
> > Patches appreciated.
>
> Uh, oh, I have some *work* to do :-)
>
> BTW, what's the Measure_grouping_engraver?  I can't guess from the
> docs what it actually does.  There is a beatGrouping property which
> looks promising for my problem -- you rely on the standard definitions
> in auto-beam.scm, just telling lilypond how to subdivide a bar (this
> is, the autobeamer applies to the sub-bars defined with the
> beatGrouping property).

May I suggest a notation for advanced autobeaming?

I have been doing some thinking about how to make autobeaming user-friendly. 
My conclusion is that the easiest way might be to show by example how to 
autobeam. I.e., autobeaming would take a beamed \notes block as a parameter, 
something like

\useAutoBeaming \notes {c8[ c c] c[ c c] c[ c] c[ c]}

for your example. Of course something more sophisticated is needed (such as 
different beamings for different durations), you would perhaps still need to 
pass parameters such as duration and key signature.

This is just Food For Thought, of course, and not a complete specification. 
It's just that I believe that this kind of syntax could be kind of 
user-friendly..

Erik