Re: slur corehack

[David Wright]

My last contribution to this thread.

On Thu 26 May 2016 at 18:34:44 (-0700), Flaming Hakama by Elaine wrote:
> The main thing that is irritating about this exchange
> is that you seem invested in maintaining low-quality documentation.
> 
> What is your motivation for that?
> 
> I'm trying to help make lilypond more accessible to potential new users,
> and also to help current users improve their workflows and results.

All power to your elbow. And the fact that my opinions of the current
state of LP and its docs differ from yours does not mean that I'm
trying to oppose your efforts in any way. Sorry if you got that
impression. I can't understand your suspicion of my motives.

> Documentation is not all about you.  It is about many people.
> 
> There are different styles of learning.  It seems weird to me to suggest
> that because you might not benefit from something, that no one else would.

This is a list. I can only express my opinions; others express theirs.
I don't try to second-guess them.

> The problems I see in my original include bars 7 (too close to tuplet
> number), bars 31, 40, 66, 67, 68, 75, 76 (crosses accidental), as well as
> bars 7-8, 43-44, 49 (slurs too far from notes).    That's about 11 out of
> 32 slurs on the part, or 1/3 of all slurs being problematic.
> 
> (This is not even counting the ones that are split across staves, which are
> too short, and I still don't know how to solve that.)
> 
> Every single one of these issues was fixed by the intermediate iteration!
> This created other problems (generally, too curvy), but those were fixed by
> choosing better values.

You made it very easy to make an A-B comparison of (1) and (2), and
difficult for (2) and (3). When I compare (1) and (2), I see graceful
slurs that have been turned into humps. I'm obviously less sensitive
about slurs touching accidentals (bar 13), but (2) leaves 1/3 staff-
space gap between the ♮ and the slur and has its endpoints *closer* to
the noteheads resulting in what I see as a hump. (Obviously, that's
only my opinion.) Bar 14 then has a funny little hump of its own.

Now I could be misinterpreting your use of "final" version: it might
be what you ended up handing out to musicians to play, or final
because it's the last of the three examples, or final because it's
your considered best shot; I took the last meaning because you wrote
that you'd settled on these values.

By spreading the music out in (3), the steepness of the slurs in (2),
which I don't like, is diminished. But taking bars 13 and 14 again,
and using the staff lines as a measuring guide, I don't see much
difference in the humpiness; maybe a little more than (2), in fact.

So my *opinion* is that, were (3) set as tightly as (1) and (2), it
would look worse that (1)...

> [...] you cannot evaluate a style by looking at one curve.
> That's like trying to pick a document font by looking at how one word
> looks.  You need to look at the entire document (or at least a page, or
> relevant flows) in order to evaluate your choice for things like
> readability and density.

...and that the look of the page owes more to the change in density
than to making the slurs more curvy. Thus I would not be happy if your
desired defaults became "the" LP defaults. If I understand correctly
though, that is not your wish, though one might be forgiven for
thinking so from use of the word "core" in the subject line.

> My point is that this approach is vastly better than what is presented in
> the docs, for solving the majority of problems in this area, at least in my
> scores.
> 
> The alternative was so tedious for me, that for years I just gave up, and
> accepted mediocre results.
> 
> So, that's why I think this may be an improvement worthy of discussion.

I'm for the quiet life. I'll keep my opinions to myself on this one, and
try to stick to areas where one can say that something did or didn't work.

Cheers,
David.