New user frustration, pedal and alternative endings, roman numerals

[Tim Ringenbach]

I decided I wanted to mess with some music in svg format. I decided to use
lilypond, and to typeset something from my beginner's piano book to play
around with. I was mainly using lilypond

2.17.91, although I also had a copy of 2.16.2.

You can see the page I was trying to duplicate on amazon's preview, it's
page 116, "Why Am I Blue?".
http://www.amazon.com/Adult-All-In-One-Course-Lesson-Theory-Technic-
Level/dp/0882848186/ref=sr_1_2?
I was not trying to duplicate any of the red text, only the normal notation.


(I was doing this for personal use and to learn lilypond, I know I can't
distribute someone else's copyrighted stuff)

After googling and reading various pages of the manual, I decided to use the
parallel mode.

Things were going well until I got to the first and second endings. Wrapping
everything in \repeat worked, but everything blew up when I tried add
\alternative. At one point I got it to compile, but it duplicated the staffs.
I thought maybe it was broken in the 2.17 version, so I tried 2.16, and
\repeat didn't work at all in that.

Eventually, after many wasted hours, I redid it without parallel mode and that
worked well. (I get the impression that parallel mode just doesn't work in
certain situations, and I wish that the manual hadn't suggested that I use
it.)

But, I still wasn't able to get the pedal in the second ending to start out
open. It always gave me a warning that the \sustainOff didn't have a
matching \sustainOn for the last measure. It worked in the first ending
though, which I thought was a little odd since they were both in the
\alternative tag.

Eventually I gave up on that and let the pedal start on the first node of the
last measure, and end on the first rest.

Finally, I got to the roman numerals, and from what I could find, there's
not really a way to do that. That I also found surprising, because lilypond
seems to support so much obscure stuff, I thought
for sure it would support anything in a beginner's book.


Anyway, I don't really have any questions. I just wanted to relay my
experience in case it's helpful to the developers.

Thanks,
Tim