I'm not a musician. I'm editing a published violin score using lilypond. The
book is a set of studies by Robert Pracht and in many of them the note which
ends a hairpin falls on a downbeat. I don't know if this is something
exceptional or pretty normal in modern music but in this book this is
frequent. I also know that the Lilypond documentation clearly says (thank
you Urs for the info):
If the note which ends a hairpin falls on a downbeat, the hairpin stops at
the bar line immediately preceding.
I would like to suggest to change actual Lilypond behaviour so that Lilypond
respects user intention and when it compiles code like following
{
\time 4/4
a\< b c d
e\! f g a
}
end the hairpin on the indicated note ("e" in this case).
The reason is that when possible, when user intention are clear and not
ambiguos, when this does not require more programming work for lilypond
programmer, I think Lilypond should do what user ask and do not follow
conventions.
This is expecially true for this case where for user there is no reason to
specify the hairpin end position on "e" if he wants it on "d".
Discussing with Urs, he said: <<I don't think this would be changed any time
soon - even if it were agreed that the other behaviour would be better as
default it would spoil all existing scores, so the change would be massive
actually.>>. Does people really use this features? I mean does it happen
frequently people set '\!' in a certain location expecting Lilypond render
it at the bar line immediately preceding if the note which ends a hairpin
falls on a downbeat?
Another good reason to change would be if new users (like me) periodically
pop up asking help about the hairpin position.
Thank you to Federico, Urs, Trevor, Simon and Kieren for their previous
comments.