Re: music function to be included somewhere in scm/*

[Alexander Kobel]

On 2016-12-15 17:19, Trevor Daniels wrote:
> Knut Petersen wrote Thursday, December 15, 2016 1:55 PM
>
> > minimum-length in my patch means:
> > - Don't generated automatic extenders if it's impossible to give them 
> > minimum-length.
> > - Use minimum-length for forced extenders at unusual places (single note) if 
> > possible.
> >
> > I think the most reasonable way is to keep that traditional name.
>
> I don't understand what you mean for the proposed behaviour.
>
> Currently, I set minimum-length = 0 in all Lyric contexts so that I
> can place identical lyrics in several voices, all with extenders, but
> the extenders appear in the score only when they correspond to melismata.

With the effect that sometimes you'll have extenders that are merely 
flyspecks, yes.

> In other words the extender is permitted to reduce in size to 0, which
> seems pretty well what "minimum-length" means.
>
> Will this behaviour change with your proposed patch?

Yes: it will improve.

(1) You can put the lyrics to all voices, as extenders are only printed 
on melismata (unless explicitly enforced).
(2) You don't have to add __ in your lyrics anymore - it's done 
automagically (unless explicitly disabled).
(3) minimum-length (or some other name) is used to control appearance 
(right now, you "abuse" it to fake semantics).

Explanation for (3): On short melismata you'll often want to hide 
extenders if the syllable has (almost) the same horizontal extent as the 
music. That's dependent on line breaks etc., so you'll optimally want a 
minimum-length /strictly/ larger than 0 (to ensure that you don't have 
the previously mentioned flyspecks), but smaller than, say, 2 staff 
spaces. So extenders that have a natural length of 2 units are printed, 
shorter ones aren't.
IMHO, setting minimum-length to 0 is an ingenious workaround for a 
missing functionality (namely, disabling extenders on non-melismata), 
but it means that you lose the functionality it is intended for.

AFAICS, nothing will change for your existing scores.


Cheers,
Alexander