Re: Lilypond Style Guide

[Joe Neeman]

On Tue, 2008-08-05 at 00:03 -0700, Jordan Eldredge wrote:
> I am currently working on wikilily.org and realized that one thing
> that could be very helpful when collaborating on Lilypond code, would
> be a style guide. My question for all of you is: has any other project
> drafted a style guide for Lilypond code?
Not that I know of. Style is somewhat personal, but I'll contribute the
indentation that I always use.

> The main things I imagine it wold cover would be:
> 
> How many spaces should an indent be?
I use 2 (spaces, not tabs).

> When should indentation be used?
After every '{' or '<<', unless the music enclosed in these delimiters
is very short. I put these delimeters (and the corresponding closing
delimiters) on a line by themselves.

> Where should line breaks be used?
At least every bar. If a bar is long, there should be a break within the
bar, preferably at a rhythmically significant point. I put bar checks
every bar, at the beginning of the line. The bar checks are un-indented
by 2 spaces. This makes it easy to see which lines are new bars by
scanning down the left hand side:
{
| a4 b c d
| a4 b c d
| a8 a a a % long bar
  b8 b b b
| a4 b c d % new bar

I also put a comment every 5 or 10 bars with the bar number in it.

> Where should spaces be used?
I put spaces in between notes, but not in between any articulations or
markups that follow a note:
a8->-.\f^\markup {"blah"}~ a8
not
a8 -> -. \f etc.

> Another thing it might include would be:
> 
> A general guide for structuring the code.
I put each instrument in its own variable and common markings in a
separate variable. If I need to tweak line or page breaking, I put
breaks in another variable. Similarly if I need to tweak things with
extra-offset (something that I have pretty much stopped doing since
2.11). I have never used \tag, probably because I developed my lilypond
habits before it was introduced and I never bothered to change.

Then I use python scripts to generate \score blocks (because they are
very repetitive) for each instrument and for the score. But that's
probably beyond the scope of a style guide.

Joe