lilypond-user
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Fixed width measures


From: Urs Liska
Subject: Re: Fixed width measures
Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2015 09:21:13 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.5.0



Am 05.03.2015 um 08:34 schrieb Brian Barker:
At 11:37 05/03/2015 +1100, Andrew Bernard wrote:
I have asked this question on the list in the past, but no solution seems to be available. The topic is fixed width measures. I have contemporary music that has lots of complex tuplets within tuplets and rapidly varying time signatures (New Complexity School). The composer I am working with draws all his scores by hand, and uses a fixed measure width notation to help the performer understand the very complex rhythms, with a fixed physical measure length corresponding to a specific fixed interval of time. Actually, several composers do this.

I have tried everything to do with proportional notation and new spacing sections but I can't seem to succeed. Is there any way to instruct lilypond to use a fixed length, absolute size measure?

I see that others have wanted this capability for fixed width measures for chord charts, overriding the lovely and subtle way that lilypond has of moving the bar lines on the page around a little for readability and aesthetics.

I am attaching the smallest most simplified snippet I can make that shows unequal measures. If anybody can make something like this have fixed width measures, let me know!

I am aware that this goes entirely against classical engraving principles, and all of lilypond's aesthetic architecture, but it is 2015 now! Does this require internal code hacking of the layout engine somewhere deep down below the user level? It's frustrating to be defeated by a man with a pencil who can simply rule lines! :-)

o Insert "indent = 0" - so that your first system is the same length as the other.

o Change the value in "proportionalNotationDuration = #(ly:make-moment 1/20)" to 1/28 - following the advice in the Notation manual: "How do we select the right reference duration to pass to proportionalNotationDuration? Usually by a process of trial and error, beginning with a duration close to the fastest (or smallest) duration in the piece."

Now I see three systems, each with two bars of exactly equal length.

At smaller staff sizes, I can see two systems of three bars each - but they are not quite of equal length. The problem seems to be the time signature, occurring in only the first system. Can you put up with no time signature? Or with time signatures in both systems? Or (probably best) with an invisible time signature (to take up appropriate space) in subsequent systems?

Or put the time signature in a separate context, as in the last example of http://lilypondblog.org/2014/05/independent-meters/

One solution hasn't been mentioned so far - but I agree that this is a hack and it would be nice to have a stable solution built-in to LilyPond.

You can override the minimal-length of MultiMeasureRest and add an invisible layer with (only) MultiMeasureRests. This will cause all measures to have _at least_ that length. So the limitation is that you have to take care that this minimal length is long enough for all your measures.

HTH
Urs

Brian Barker

_______________________________________________
lilypond-user mailing list
address@hidden
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]