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Re: detailed look on lilypond output


From: Erik Sandberg
Subject: Re: detailed look on lilypond output
Date: Wed, 5 May 2004 00:53:30 +0200
User-agent: KMail/1.5.4

On Friday 16 April 2004 23.48, Michael Kiermaier wrote:
> Hello!

Sorry for the very late reply.

> It is my strong believe that a perfect music typesetter only needs the pure
> musical information of a music file, without redundancy. For this reason I
> never was happy with Finale & Co., and for the very same reason lilypond
> looks tremendously appealing to me.

Lilypond is not a perfect typesetter though, even though it might currently be 
the best non-human one. Keep in mind that the goal of making lilypond output 
comparable to good hand-engraved scores, is a _very_ long-term goal.

> A)
> bar 1: There is a line titled %HACK in the source file which is necessary
> to get the bar printed correctly. This is a bug documented in the manual. I
> was a bit surprised that 2.2 does not fix it.

When a bug is documented in the manual, this usually means that there is no 
easy fix for it. Which means that it probably will take some time before the 
bug gets fixed.

> B)
> bar 1, left hand: The bass clef should be placed below the notes of the
> right hand. For example, in bar 17 lilypond sets the treble clef correctly.
> I am not sure why this does not happen in bar 1.

A bug.

> C)
> I feel that the accidentals of grace note are too much apart from the main
> note. This can be observed in many locations, the first one is the f# in
> the left hand of bar 6.

Possibly a bug; The horizontal spacing of grace notes are not scaled down 
accordingly.

We would appreciate if you could check how this is done in good hand-engraved 
scores. If you can show by example, that lilypond really breaks the common 
practise of how grace note accidentals should be spaced, then the priority of 
fixing this will increase.

> D)
> bar 7, left hand: The bass clef is set too close to the preceeding bb-note.

You mean that clefs need to have a certain amount of space to the left of 
them?

If yes, then how much? (& do you have good examples of scores which use this 
extra spacing?)

> E)
> bar 9, left hand: There is a collision between the slur and the 3 of the
> triplet.

Bug. However, the slur engine is known to be broken. A total rewrite will be 
done sometime in a not-so-close future. Before that, non-critical slur bugs 
like this one will not be fixed.

> F)
> bar 31, right hand: There is a collision of the grace note d and the ledger
> line of the succeeding chord.

Is this a bug? Shouldn't notes be allowed to cross ledger lines? (this is NOT 
a rhethorical question; a well-motivated answer is appreciated)

> G)
> Many ties look too steep. For example in bar 32, right hand; or in bar 41,
> right hand. I am not sure if the horizontal alignment of the ties is
> correct. I looked at scores of Edition Peters, and I have the impression
> that ties get hooked horizontally to the center of the note heads, if this
> is possible without collision, otherwise they are hooked to the inner
> border (I hope this is understandable). Lilypond seems to hook always to
> the inner border.

See E.

> H)
> bar 37, right hand. There is a collision of two ties. In version 2.0 the
> tie of the note e went down, so there was no collision of the ties (but a
> collision with the ledger line). I guess the correct thing would be the
> behaviour of 2.0, but making the tie a bit flatter (or steeper?) to avoid
> the collision with the ledger line.

See E

> J)
> bar 37, left hand. The upper slur collides with the flag. This clearly does
> not look good, but I am not sure what would be the correct way resolve it.

See E

> K)
> bar 42, right hand. The ending of the 8va-bracket doesn't look good. It
> should end either clearly before or clearly behind the dot, in my opinion.
> In 2.0 it ended (too much) before the dot, but it did not look good,
> either.

Bug. Again, can you check with your sources, what is the common practise among 
good hand-engraved scores? Does the bracket consequently end before or after 
the dot?

> Please note that I am not looking for manual fixes for these observations.
> A, B, D, E, F, H, K look like bugs to me. Maybe I discovered some unknown
> ones. I hope that my post helps to fix them quickly.
> Also I hope to have a discussion about the observations, especially the
> more arguable ones.

I have sent bugreports (cc:ed to you?) about those marked "Bug". Please 
continue the discussion.

Erik





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