Re: Understanding herd of curly braces

[James Bailey]

On Jan 24, 2011, at 10:07 PM, Seth Williamson wrote:

I have turned out a few simple jobs with LilyPond, mainly simple copying jobs just for practice and -- as a practical matter -- a few pieces that I needed to transpose into another key.

However, as I look at LilyPond code generated by others, it's not obvious to me (usually near the end of a document) what each closing curly brace refers to.

Am I even SUPPOSED to be able to figure that out by looking at all the closed curly braces, usually at different indentations on different lines?  Are you supposed to see these things and know to what they apply in the code above?  Is there a logic here that I'm missing?

I am trying to figure out the logic of why the close braces (in particular) appear where they are and at a given indentation.  So far there's nothing intuitive about it.

Such documentation as I've been able to find at the LilyPond site and elsewhere has been of limited utility in this regard.

Is this something you just learn by doing?  Or can anybody help me out?

Seth Williamson

Because this is something not limited to lilypond, the documentation in lilypond is rather scant on the subject. Editors of programs which use braces extensively usually have features to make indentation and bracket matching more transparent and easier to use. They are also usually highly modifiable, and each person learns and finds a method that works for him. There are some suggested editors for lilypond, and each of those should have some means of making understanding indentation and brackets (and matching them) more transparent and easy to understand.

Most of these programs should have a way of easily jumping between matching brackets, and adjusting the indentation of a region.

If you haven't yet, I highly recommend reading through the learning manual, aside from the ins and outs of how lilypond works, it also has some helpful tips on how to organize brackets and indentation in your own files. (At least, it did the last time I read it.)

Hope this helps,

James