Re: accidental too far away from notehead

[David Kastrup]

Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> writes:

>> Gould says Octave accidentals are easiest to read when they align.
>> So this would make the current lilypond implementation correct.  She
>> also recommends changing the layout to prevent accidentals being too
>> far from their notehead - so ideally lilypond would place the upper
>> E# close to the notehead (so the lower one would also be there) and
>> then arrange the others traditionally.
>
> I'm not convinced that this is valid for voices within a single staff
> which have a large vertical distance.

An octave _is_ a large vertical distance.  It can't be valid for
anything _smaller_ than an octave, obviously.

> If the distance exceeds a certain threshold (say, more than a ninth),
> I would rather suggest that the voices are treated independently, this
> is, that the accidental clusters are computed separately, as
> originally stated by David.

Well, the point of aligning them vertically is to make them stand out as
a unit.  That makes sense to me.

They stand out even more when this causes a large horizontal distance.
While this is not particularly something to aim for, I don't consider it
worse than the loss of visual grouping.

Now one might argue that a two-octave gap can't be played with one hand
anyway, so the gain is minimal.  However, it might help the conductor,
and there are instruments where you can span two octaves (like a
chromatic button accordion), and you might have one staff for two
instruments.  So unless your accidentals are per-voice (suggesting that
each voice stares only at its own accidentals), the grouping still makes
sense.

> BTW, it's easy to construct a situation even with Mike's patch (thanks
> for the quick fix!) where a chord contains enough accidentals so that
> accidentals in the separate voice are still too far to the left.

What is "too far"?

-- 
David Kastrup