Re: short instrument name setting

[James E. Bailey]

Am 08.01.2009 um 23:15 schrieb chip:
> I've been reading all the messages in this thread and haven't quite  
> understood all of it, but I believe you are referring to the  
> content section as the section where all the notes are. That being  
> the wrong place to put
> \set short.instrumentname. I finally settled on putting the  
> instrument names in this section of my score, which is how I have  
> it now, using the header item 'piece'. This works well and looks  
> good on the printed sheet.

That's exactly it. The idea is that there are two aspects to data  
entry in lilypond, what is displayed and how it is displayed. The  
musical notes being the what (content) and what is actually put on  
the page being the how (presentation). If you think about it, if you  
have your music in a variable, you've already started separating things.

I think of it kinda like database normalization. Keep everything  
separate and reference it where you need to.

So, the \set Staff.instrumentName and \set Staff.shortInstrumentName,  
not being actual notes, and only being necessary for presentation,  
should be kept outside of any definition of notes that occur with the  
instrument. You could define a context for instrument names, which is  
probably way more work than is necessary for most situations, or, do  
as you said, and modify your Staff definition to have the appropriate  
instrumentName and shortInstrumentName and everything else. The goal  
is to be able to easily generate score and parts in whatever format  
that may be desired as easily as possible.