Cross-staff stems

[Phil Holmes]

http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2427 links to an example 
implementation of cross-staff stems done by Pavel.  It's now sort-of 
delivered as part of lilypond code, as a snippet in snippets/new.  AFAICS 
it's an almost perfectly workable implementation.  I think that an 
enhancement would be to remove the flags for the crossing stems - they're 
never there (AFAICS) in real music, and Gould shows the stems without flags. 
It's trivial to do this by adding an override/revert to the crossStaff 
function.

I don't see why this isn't implemented as a standard feature of lilypond, 
instead of just being an example in a snippet that's not even in the 
documentation.  I'd be happy to document it if we did this.  What do others 
think - could this be added as a standard function - it would make my life 
_a lot_ easier.

I've attached a simple example of how to use it and the output (including my 
proposed override to get rid of spurious flags).

{
 <<
   \new PianoStaff <<
     \new Staff = "RH"
     <<
       \new Voice
       {
         \autoBeamOff
         \stemUp < d'' b' >4 b'4 b'4 b'4 |  % 1
         b'8 b'8 b'8 [ b'8  b'8 b'8 ] b'8 b'8 |
       }
     >>
     \new Staff = "LH"
     <<
       \new Voice
       {
         \autoBeamOff
         \stemUp \crossStaff { < g' e'>4 g'4 g'4 g'4 } |  % 1
         \crossStaff { g'''''8 g'8 g'8 g'8 g'8 g'8 g'8 g'8 } |
       }
     >>
   >>
 >>
}

--
Phil Holmes

CrossStaff.png
Description: PNG image