Re: horizontal control

[Kevin Barry]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 7:31 PM, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:

Actually, making a couple other measures wider would likely also do the trick.  In trying to create a small file which demonstrates the problem I am mystified as when I excerpt the section I want to change the excerpt doesn't display the problem.  I'll have to try to see why.  Another thing I want to do is to shorten the stems on some beamed notes.  I can shorten them on separately flagged ones, but I have not found how to shorten beamed stems.  Hints?

Keep experimenting with removing things until you find the culprit - sometimes strange spacing issues are caused by note values that are not entered correctly (bar checks help here, but I must admit that I'm too lazy to use them). About the length of stems if notes are beamed you have to edit the Beam.positions rather than the stems. It's not a very elegant override as you have to set the absolute positions of the beams, that is, you can't simply reduce their height by a fixed amount - you have to choose the staff line/space where they will stop (with 0 being the midline of the staff and positive values above and negative values below), for example:

\version "2.18.2"

\relative {
  \once \override Beam.positions = #'(-1 . -1)
  b8 b b b
  \once \override Beam.positions = #'(0 . 5)
  b b b b
}