Re: GDP: Rhythms rewrite

[Miguel Lopes Santos Ramos]

> On 7 Oct 2007, at 01:13, Graham Percival wrote:
>
> I've identified the following areas to work on; please add items or =20=
> discuss them.

I don't know if this sort of thing is what you're asking for...

For me, the biggest problem is the one which is stated as a "Bug" in the manual
about the synchronization of grace notes (section 6.5.7 of the manual).

I very often write grace notes in scores with many staves (of course). In
Lilypond it often happens that I need to add "grace spacing", \grace s8 for
instance, on other voices.
This makes no sense, grace notes do not take up any time of their own, by
definition, they steal it from "real" notes, and therefore it is correctly
labeled as a "bug" in the manual.
The problem is that the proposed work-around becomes unmanageable. Suppose
you're writing an orquestral score, and have the scores for each instrument even
perhaps in separate files. One problem you already have is maintaining the
synchronization of bars, that is, make sure no bar is missing on any score. But
this is supposed to be, and Lilypond has the appropriate tools to make sure the
bars stay in synch.
This need for "grace spacing" requires you to make sure that "grace spacing"
isn't missing in any score, you, the writer, are given by the program an
additional task, which not only makes no sense in music as is also very hard to
manage correctly. Whenever you add a set of grace notes to one score near some
bar line in some cases which I cannot predict correctly, you are forced to add
corresponding spacing to every other score.

So, I don't know if this is the kind of feature that you may be going to rework,
if it isn't, it's ok...
I do think this is something which must be considered a priority due to:
- It is not easily predictable when "grace spacing" is going to be necessary.
- It is very hard to manage that all staves of a given score have been added the
necessary spacing.

Greetings,

Miguel