True Hand-engraved Dashed Slurs

[Abraham Lee]

Greetings, Devs!

I have always wondered why dashed slurs look the way they do, especially
when compared to the Barenreiter snippets found in the essay. The current
dashes look better than they used to, but I still think they look a bit odd
compared to the fairly uniform thickness of the hand-engraved Barenreiter
ones. Is there any historical reason they don't look that way? I'd be
curious to know if there is because I very much like the look of the
hand-engraved dashed slurs over the current LP dashed slurs.

In any case, I'm wondering what the right way to go about changing them to
look more like the Barenreiter ones is. I've cobbled together some PS code
that takes the Tie/Slur/PhrasingSlur control points and then generates a
separate stencil using those, but with a single dashed curve. This seems to
work just fine, but I'm wondering if there's a better internal way of
getting the same dashed curve without resorting to pure PS code?

You'll find my code and a comparison PDF attached.

All the best,
Abraham

old-style-dashed-slur.ly
Description: Binary data

old-style-dashed-slur.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document