Re: film score example

[Urs Liska]

Hi Curt,

this seems very nice work. If you feel like sharing one or the other 
experience as a blog post or pdf tutorial on lilypondblog.org don't 
hesitate contacting me privately.

As I'm working in quite different fields I don't have to say much to 
many of your perceptions. Just a few comments below:

Am 13.09.2013 05:54, schrieb Curt:
> ...
>
> ~^~^~^~^
>
> Unexpectedly hard parts of creating this score (all specific to v2.16):
>
> - General spacing and staff sizes.  I believe Lilypond by default puts 
> everything
>         too close together for music that is read by instrumentalists, 
> particularly
>         sight-readers.  The spacing commands are easy to use, but difficult to 
> find
>         and look up if you don't already know them.

I think this is highly subjective or task-related. For my purposes the 
spacing is usually too loose, and I usually start making things smaller 
and tighter. And I _am_ an instrumentalist and sight-reader ;-)

This said, I suggest getting used to the concept of 'house styles' in 
order to get a layout tailored to your needs with (usually) one \include 
command.

The problem with the documentation is well known. Unfortunately it isn't 
possible to make everything as digestable as the Learning Manual. But I 
think a considerable share of development power already goes into 
improving documentation.

> - Hairpins are surprisingly difficult.  Most instruments do not have a natural
>         decay, so hairpins don't necessarily start or end right at the note
>         boundaries.  It's necessary to use "fake voices" in these cases.  Even
>         with this, it didn't support having a decrescendo end at the Fine bar -
>         I had to make it end at a note value before the Fine bar.  And
>         if you have ties over these fake voices, you have to know about
>         \set tieWaitForNote = ##t

+1
> - Header text elements are a bit bearish to configure.  Our instructions were to
>         put the instrument name in the "upper left" of each part; I ended up 
> using
>         the out of the box "poet" slot, and then later reconfigured all of
>         bookTitleMarkup to reposition "instrument" when it became clear I'd need
>         the "instrument" slot for later pages.  It also could be easier to put a
>         simple newline in, for longer instrument names.
+1
> - In film scoring, it's common to include the information of the SMPTE timecode
>         of when a last note in a cue gets cut off, for the instruments that are
>         playing at that time.  It was not possible to make a \markup element
>         right-align with the final barline.  This eventually required a few
>         overrides to Score.RehearsalMark - not too bad, but it felt a bit
>         hackish.

This is somewhat similar to a feature request I just read in the 'Making 
Notes' blog: The ability to display MIDI CC curves in a score.
Might also be a good thing for LilyPond (if it isn't doable already).

Best
Urs