automatic beaming in tuplets

[luis jure]

hello list,

i'm a beginner at lilypond, i know enough to enter music in a simple
way. i still don't know enough of the language to try elaborate tweaks,
but i find that usually lilypond is smart enough to produce good output
for music that's not too complex.

but i suspect that automatic beaming is not working correctly in
certain cases involving tuplets. i include a short snippet with the
corresponding image. i'm using a recently compiled 2.11.41 on linux.

in 4/4 time signature, eight notes are beamed every 4 notes (i. e. into
whole notes, m.1 in the example), which is of course correct; sixteenth
notes are also correctly beamed every 4 notes into quarter notes (m.2).
but 16th notes quintuplets and sextuplets are beamed into whole notes,
even if that means including a pair of eight notes (m3 and m4). the
same with 32nd septuplets (m5). normal 32nd notes, on the other hand,
are beamed every 4 notes into eight notes, while i find that beaming
every 8 notes is more standard. i find other anomalies, like the 8th
notes quintuplet beamed together with the preceding 8th notes (m6).

as a beginner, i don't know if these are bugs, my mistakes, or if that
is the intended behavior. in the last case, could i ask the authors to
reconsider the criteria used for automatic beaming? 

i know that you can adjust the beaming manually, or even change the
automatic beam behavior globally. but i think that the defaults should
be chosen in a way that requires as little manual tweaks as possible.

thank you for your attention.

best,

lj

beams.ly
Description: Binary data

beams.png
Description: PNG image