Questions on re-organizing the woodwind (bass-)clarinet stencils

[Wim van Dommelen]

Hi,

After last week discussions on what is / missing of / wrong in / not pretty with / wished for / the woodwind stencils, I've made a list off all things concerning the (bass-)clarinet stencils (about 20 smaller and bigger items) and I dived into the code.

I've already changed some things manually in my local copy to check my approach and knowledge and I think I can arrive at a version answering most of these. In fact I've already tested and done some smaller things. I'm aiming at arriving at a situation in which one diagram covers the Selmer and Buffet Crampon top-models so covering most of the users. To be honest and have the credits right: Mike's code does (and still will do) 99.9% of things, what I will do is just "dressing up".

However I think I arrived at a "crossroad" into multiple possibilities:

1. Either I keep everything intact so new things will only show up in the result with the current key-name addressing kept intact. This limits me in repairing some things.

-- OR --

2. I throw over some of the code, clean up, do some renaming of keys wanted, but with the danger of upsetting people who are already using the current diagrams. For example: I want to rename the right-hand key labeled "four" to "side-ees" to make to naming more consistent and change the label accordingly. But this also has effect on the basic clarinet stencil. If someone then uses a diagram specifying this key, it will throw an error. Of course, I'll have a list of changes available, but that will still involve updating your code. Note: I'm only looking at and changing the clarinet stencil(s), all the other instruments I won't touch.

-- OR --

3. I'll create a new stencil "bass-clarinet-low-C" in which these changes/additions/repairs are done and leave all the rest as-it-is. This is more difficult because some things are intertwined with the clarinet stencil (the "hole" problem might also force me to tear that apart). From a user compatibility viewpoint this is of course most desired, but from a code perspective it will keep lot's of things there (and duplicated) which are unnecessary because in this case I can't clean up.

My personal preference goes towards method 2.

All: Comments please.

Clarinettists and bass-clarinettists: are you using the diagrams? or are you not using the diagrams for a specific reason?

Regards,

Wim.