Re: many users don't know about \shape

[Urs Liska]

Am 12.05.2013 13:35, schrieb David Nalesnik:

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 11:42 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:

2013/5/11 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:

Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:

my experience (particularly with Fried project) shows that
with regard to slurs and ties, LilyPond is very far from automated
typesetting. If you want publication quality, you _have_ to tweak the
output quite heavily - would you rather do this via setting
control-points directly?  Actually, \shape is quite close to the
spirit of automated engraving, because if the layout changes slightly,
\shape modifications usually "adapt" and still produce good results.

Not if there is a change in line/page breaking.

Sure, but it's still about a thousand times more reliable than
overriding control-points directly.

Hardly.  It's slightly more benign against different amonuts of
stretching/shrinking,

"Slightly"?  This strikes me as a bit of an exaggeration.

but when the slur positioning algorithm changes,
relative changes to control points will give unpredictable results.

As I said above, it is most useful when such layout details as line and
page breaks are settled--as, of course, is directly overriding control
points,

David N,

I think David K is referring to changes in LilyPond's implementation in new versions, not to changes in the layout of the current score. You can't rely on your \shape modifications to still work correctly with new Lily versions.

But I'm not sure if that's the real problem. Of course I have to look for regressions if I update a score to a newer LilyPond version.
And I have to check this for slurs too that I didn't tweak explicitely (they too may become worse in a specific situation, even when the automatic engraving has improved in general).
And as others have pointed out there will always be the need to tweak engraving manually.  For these cases it is just better to have \shape than to have to edit control-points manually, because there are infinitely more cases where it works well.

Urs

-David

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