Re: An old claveciniste's notation

[Richard Shann]

On Wed, 2014-05-07 at 20:23 +1000, Andrew Bernard wrote:
> This brings up the point that there do indeed seem to be a set of
> people trying to use lilypond for baroque music engraving. Lilypond
> seems heavily oriented around nineteenth century practice (leaving
> aside it's wonderful support for ancient notations) and the very usual
> and common set of baroque keyboard ornaments (meaning, in particular,
> the French ones) have to be done with complex special techniques that
> are not easily understood or manufactured by those who do not know
> Scheme.
> 
> Why can't lilypond be extended to have in the base code a full set of
> French baroque ornament signs and symbols? How would one initiate such
> a request?

There is a bug tracker for that, but from the lack of response I would
guess there isn't enough demand. However, I have been digging a bit into
this, as there is indeed at least one other ornament in the score I am
working from that is not available. The pincé appearing next to the note
is a rather special case, as is the coulé that I originally asked about,
but for many others here is a route which seems to work:

I created an eps file from the fermata.svg which is an image of the
fermata extracted from the emmentaler font, purely as an example to work
with, and placed it
in /home/rshann/git-denemo/denemo/pixmaps/fermata.eps

then I wrote four notes with the code

 a'4 a' 
 ^\markup {\combine 
\epsfile #X #2 #"/home/rshann/git-denemo/denemo/pixmaps/fermata.eps" 
\with-dimensions #'(0 . 6) #'(0 . 10)
    \postscript #"
      newpath
      closepath
      "
} 
a'4 a' 

and the result is that the second a' note has a fermata over it.

Now, I cannibalized that code from 

http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/formatting-text#index-epsfile

but the documentation there is not sufficient for me to know what
exactly all the bits are doing; if anyone can prune that code further,
or say what can be usefully done with the parameters in it, I would be
grateful.

Anyway, this provides a route for including other special ornaments -
I'll include the one (the "suspension") I need right now in the next
Denemo release so that it can be applied via a simple command as with
any other ornament.

If anyone has other .svg's that they want including, please let me know.

Richard



> 
> It's interesting that it was only two or three weeks ago that I myself
> asked about pincé, and here it is again. So there is some growing
> demand.
> 
> I am of course aware that there is generally more than one way to
> notate the French ornaments, but that can be dealt with I imagine.
> 
> Andrew
> 
> 
> > 
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