Strange beamed-extreme-minimum-free-lengths behaviour etc.

[Risto Vääräniemi]

Dear All,

I've been playing with stem lengths because I haven't been completely happy
how they behave in forced directions. Especially in choir music, e.g.
soprano and alto voices are often combined into a single staff and they are
logically separated by forcing the stems in different directions.*) This
usually results in a score with very short and long stems on top of each
other and that looks a bit silly to me. I'm not sure if the fact that I've
grown to look at scores created in Finale has made me think so. :-) 

The behaviour of beamed-lengths beamed-minimum-free-lengths and
beamed-extreme-minimum-free-lengths is also a bit fuzzy to me. If I've
understood correctly the beamed-lengths specifies the basic length of the
stem and beamed-extreme-minimum-free-lengths the shortest possible stem
length. The beamed-minimum-free-lengths seems to be used for setting the
stem length when the note is positioned on the middle staff line. Am I
right? The internals page isn't very clear to me but I've found a
combination of the above-mentioned parameters as well as the stem-shorten
value that pleases my eye most of the time.

However, the beamed-extreme-minimum-free-lengths causes unexpected stem
lengths. The snippet below should demonstrate it. The first four eights are
printed using default values. For the last four I've modified the
beamed-extreme-minimum-free-lengths a bit. 

*The question:* Why is the seventh stem longer than any of the others?


-Risto

*) I'm sure you're familiar with choir notation but I just wanted to clarify
why I'm ranting about this. :-) 

http://www.nabble.com/file/p13118523/minimum-extreme.png Snippet in PNG 

%%%%%%% Start %%%%%%%%
\version "2.11.32"

\paper { ragged-right = ##t }

\relative c' {
    \stemUp    
    a'8[ a] a g 
        \override Stem #'details #'beamed-extreme-minimum-free-lengths = 
#'(2.5)
    a[ a] a g    
}
%%%%%%% End %%%%%%%%
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