Re: clusters: note spacing problem and other things

[Mats Bengtsson]

> Hello
> 
> ;; --
> 
> I am new user of lilypond. I am a composer, a young composer, and I hope that 
> I
> will be able to write my music with lilypond. But modern music is quite
> demanding and so much more difficult to typeset then ancient music.
> 
>       Is there any other composers of classical contemporary music
>       on this list?
> 
> I hope that lilypond developpers are also willing to make it a modern 
> typesetter
> alternative to commercial software (which are not good enough anyway). It 
> would
> be so nice!
> 
> So, please and in advance, pardon my requests: it will not be to point out
> things that lilypond can not do, but just things I need to be able to do, 
> hoping
> that these requests will help others (or that people on the list can help me 
> of
> course). As a lilypond beginner, I obviously probably will ask stupid
> question(s) to ...
> 
> ;; --
> 
> 
>    ly2dvi (GNU LilyPond) 1.5.13

I definitely recommend that you keep to the stable 1.4.8 release
for the moment. The 1.5.x releases contain too many bugs to be 
useful for some serious typesetting at the moment.

> So, here is a couple of little problems I encountered, very small example to
> start with
> 
>     1. the following compiles ok
> 
 ...
> 
>       but does not produce the expected display results: even the "r2." and
>       the "a2." does not produce the result expected, (the dot is in the note,
>       and not after the note)
> 
>       or is it my xdvi? (it seems i have xdvik, should i get another xdvi?

This is one of the known bugs in 1.5.13, it has been solved 
in 1.5.14 but again I recomend 1.4.8 instead.

> 
> ;; --
> 
>     2. the following does not compiles
> 
  ...
> 
> clusters in general are not 'displayed' properly, note spacing problems. a 
> strange
> thing is that if I do not have
> 
>             {a2. <a2. b2. c2. a2is.> ...}
>             but
>             {<a2. b2. c2. a2is.> ...}
> 
>             then the cluster is really badly 'computed'
> 
> is there a special feature for clusters?

You have already received an answer for the compilation problem, 
if you still have problems with clusters (I'm not 100% sure 
what kind of problem you refer to), please send a new example
that has correct syntax. If the problem is colliding note heads,
Lilypond implements a number of rules of thumb that can handle
the easiest problems, see the test example 
input/regression/collisions.ly, but for more complicated cases
you may have to specify the horizontal offset for each voice
using the force-hshift property (see input/test/force-hshift.ly
example file, but correct 'forced-hshift' to 'force-hshift'
otherwise it doesn't work). See also the section on Polyphony
in the reference manual.

> ;; --
> 
>     3. i wanted to call staff using numbers to, but is seems not possible:
> 
>       \score {
>         \notes <
>           \context Staff = Cl1 {
>             ...
>           \context Staff = Cl2 {
>         ...
> 
>       does not compile: is it the expected behavior? can't we use numbers
>       in staff names

This possibility was removed some months ago to simplify the 
frontend of the program. I miss it as much as you do.

> ;; --
> 
>     4. i would like to define a piano always with 3 staff, with clef as is:
> 
>              \violin
>              \bass
>              \bass -15 
> 
>        how can i define a clef "twice octava bassa" ? (the \bass clef with 
> the number
>        15 sligthly below and right)

It seems the documentation is slightly out of date and the interface
is a bit non-intuitive. Anyway, the following lines of code should
work

  \clef bass
  \property Staff.clefOctavation = #-15
  \property Staff.OctavateEight \set #'text = #"15"
  \property Staff.centralCPosition = #13

  /Mats