Re: shortening a stem

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > what must I write to shorten an unbeamed stem by, say, one unit?
> > A naive approach would be
> >
> >   \once \override Stem.length #(- ly:stem::calc-length 1)
> >
> > which doesn't work of course...
>
> David Nalesnik wrote a very versatile function that makes such
> things very easy.  You can find it in a thread titled "generalizing
> offsets to properties" on -devel.

Indeed, very nice!  Thanks for the link.  Unfortunately, it doesn't
work with Stem.length at all because this is not an `offset'.

> I have no idea why this wasn't added to LilyPond yet - it's very
> handy.

It seems that it doesn't yet fully support the `dot' notation
(i.e., using `foo.bar' instead of `foo #'bar').  Can this be fixed?

And yes, this is something which should be added to lilypond.  A
generalized \offset function is tremendously useful.


   Werner