Re: Beam positions and time signature spacing

[Janek Warchoł]

Hi,

2013/11/11 Gilberto Agostinho <address@hidden>:
> Peter Bjuhr wrote
>> What she is aiming at throughout the book
>> is clarity and readability of the notation especially in a performance
>> situation.
>
> Although I agree with you that these things are important, there are certain
> things that could make problems clearer and are not used. Ex: it is not
> standard to write a little "8" under the bass clef when dealing with
> Contrabass in a non-transposed orchestral score (where tranposing
> instruments, such as clarinets and horns, are written in C, but octave
> transposing instruments, such as contrabass or piccolo flute stay with their
> registers changed). This is my point here: standards. Even if something is
> prettier, simpler, nicer, it still shouldn't matter if there is a rule or
> standard behind. And I think that LilyPond should output things as close as
> possible to these standards, and then let the users who want to change
> things use \tweaks and \overrides.

I see your point and i disagree.  Some standards are silly and i see
no point in following them (or course, the majority of standards are
reasonable and they should be followed).

For example, it is (or at least used to be) standard to print guitar
music with an ordinary treble clef (guitar is a transposing
instrument).  I believe this standard is silly: there is *no* good
reason to omit the tiny "8".  Including it doesn't clutter the score,
doesn't produce information overload - it makes the score unambiguous.

Another example: for centuries, it was the standard in vocal music to
only beam together notes that are part of a melisma.  Now, there was
some reason behind it - to make clear what was a melisma and what
wasn't - but that practice was nevertheless a bad idea.  Now it is
becoming common practice to beam vocal music the same as instrumental
music, and indicate melismas using slurs (i've sung from both kinds of
scores and i have to say that the old practice can make it *very*
inconvenient to read rhythms.  New practice is simply better; Gould
also supports this new practice).

So, standards change.  If that's the case, we can be a forefront of
such changes.

Please don't get disheartened by this discussion - i believe that what
you're doing is valuable (i do agree that LilyPond's spacing between
clef and notes with many accidentals needs adjustment).  In fact, you
remind me of myself a few years ago :-)  Just be aware that when
discussing engraving practices with LilyPond devs it may be not enough
to have an engraving book that agrees with you to win the argument :-)

best,
Janek

PS if you could investigate spacing alists (this shouldn't be hard)
and make a proposal of how exactly they should be changed, that would
be very good.  Discussions about concrete proposals *with* the code
change are much different than discussions without the code.