RE: transcribe notes

[Philip Thomas]

>> Janek Warcho? writes:
>>
>>> I'm not sure.  This is a music notation question: "what's this?".
>>> Lily documentation aims to answer different kind of questions: "how do
>>> i engrave this?" and it assumes that the user knows what's what he
>>> wants.


>> Jan Nieuwenhuizen writes:
>> She wants a certain type of note.  Chances are that she can find out
>> which one it is by herself much easier when we have images of all notes
>> available.
>>
>> Jan


> Phil Holmes Writes:
>It's not too hard to find elsewhere, TBH:
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_value
>
>I'm not convinced we need to turn the Lilypond documentation into a general
>musical tutor, glossary notwithstanding.


I also don't think that the LilyPond documentation should seek to give
answers to basic music notation questions like "what is this note called?"
or "what is a breve?", although the answers would mostly no doubt be
available, somewhere or other, in the MG or elsewhere.

The breve with double lines on each side is, of course, covered on NR page
40 (PDF version), which a search of NR for "breve" quickly shows. This
particular question would probably be addressed adequately by adding a
reference in the "\breve" and "breve" entries in the NR LilyPond Index to NR
page 40. Ideally, it might also receive a mention (and an image) in the NR
Cheat Sheet, which I found very useful when I first started using LilyPond.

I remember finding some gaps in the Cheat Sheet as a new user. Might it be
worth reviewing to see whether it could be expanded and improved without
over-burdening it with detail? If it would help for me as a comparative
beginner to do some work along those lines, I would be pleased to give it a
try, if someone would let me know how to proceed. I should mention that I'm
no programmer. (And I wouldn't be offended by a polite "thanks, but no
thanks".)

Not quite the same issue, but I routinely find that it's necessary to search
both LM and NR for information which is fairly basic (and also, for that
matter, not so basic, in LM as well as NR). Is a combined index, somewhere,
for LM and NR feasible? Or even better, for _all_ of the documentation? I've
found myself in IR and even Extending more often that I was expecting, when
trying to tweak defaults and to write new music functions to abbreviate
input code (and will maybe do so one day -- over the rainbow -- trying to
write new markup commands).

While on the question of how to find answers to questions oneself, which in
fact I try hard to do before laying them at the feet of the kind and expert
people who reply to questions addressed to the user list, I would,
personally, find a "grand" version of all manuals combined in the one
searchable PDF document very useful. It might take a while to download, and
cross-links to other parts of the documentation might need adjustment for
that format, but such a file would in general suit my needs very well. (In
fact, I have already asked a friend to produce such a grand version for me,
but I decided to wait till Lily 2.16 appears.)

Cheers, Philip