Re: Workarounds for impressionistic music

[Mike Solomon]

Thanks Carl!

It looks better, and I can mess w/ lily/slur.cc to make it more dynamic.  Your 
fix gets rid of the majority of the problems.

I think that in 2.15, I will work on the cross-beam stuff, as I feel that 
Lilypond's automatic behavior could be more responsive to them.

Cheers,
MS

On Jan 15, 2011, at 1:19 PM, Carl Sorensen wrote:

> On 1/15/11 9:39 AM, "Mike Solomon" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> Hey all,
>> 
>> For class the other day, I had to typeset a Debussy example, and I found that
>> Lilypond does not like some of the hairier passages in Debussy.  To wit:
> 
>> 
>> You'll see several questionable things in Lilypond's standard output,
>> including:
>> 
>> 1. Beam / staff collisions.
>> 2. 64th note beams that seem too thick for the music they contain.
> 
> Lilypond warns you that it can't avoid these two problems. There's not
> enough space between the systems, and cross-staff beams don't adjust the
> staff-staff spacing.  LilyPond doesn't like the beam layout it can come up
> with, and it tells you so.
> 
> Overriding the staff-staff-spacing of the VerticalAxisGroup  to
> 
> \new Staff = "up" \with {
>  \override VerticalAxisGroup #'staff-staff-spacing =
>    #'((basic-distance . 15)
>       (minimum-distance . 5)
>       (padding . 1)
>       (stretchability . 10))
>  } { \key aes \major \clef bass s2. s2 r4 }
> 
> will eliminate the warnings, and eliminate the beam-staff collisions.
> Setting basic-distance to 13 or 14 will also eliminate the collisions, but
> two of the warnings continue.
> 
>> 3. Slur / staff collisions.
> 
> Increasing the system-system spacing with
> 
> \paper {
>  system-system-spacing #'basic-distance = #20
>  }
> 
> fixes the big collision problem in your code.
> 
>> 4. Slur / clef collisions.
> 
> The staff-staff-spacing override also fixes the slur-clef collision, but the
> slur still collides with a leger line.
> 
>> 5. Slurs that reach down too far, which causes a large hump @ the top.
>> Usually, in this style, the slur tips are far away from the bookend notes in
>> the arpeggio, allowing slurs to be flatter at their apogees.
> 
> Putting both of the overrides above in place causes 2 of the slurs in the
> first line to become horrible.
> 
> As far as I know, there are no overrides to fix the bad slur behavior,
> although I'm trying to experiment with some of the elements of 'details to
> see if I can fix it.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Carl
>