(Automatically) split partcombined voices to temporary staff

[Urs Liska]

Hi all,

I have a question regarding complicated orchestral material. Note that I don't need a solution right now, only a plausible estimate if that's possible to implement at all.

Consider the situation of a staff with two partcombined voices (say, flutes). If there are spots (measures or ranges of measures) where the voices are so individualized or complex that the part combination becomes unreadable I would like to split this range (measure) to two individual staves.

The attached image shows the (manually constructed) intended result. Let's assume I would consider m. 7 too complex to be combined and therefore want the whole "current" system to be split in two staves.

The ideal way would be to have an automatic function that I can call within such a measure (tagging it as "non-combinable") that would:

• Determine in which system I'm currently in and from where to where it spans (i.e. previous and next line break)
  
• Create a temporary staff for exactly that range
• Copy the music of the second voice to that staff
• remove the second voice from the current staff
• (suppress partcombine texts)

In the potential score at hand the music will be maintained in a measure based grid. That means if I could get just the first of these (i.e.. determining the current and previous line breaks) I *might* be able to achieve something. But it would be a great feature (and a "selling point" for LilyPond) if we could integrate it. I got this request from a professional engraver who says it's a problem he's dealing with all the time: manually handling the combination and temporary splitting of voices in a staff - and especially fixing things if the line breaking happens to change. He said it would be a dramatic advantage if LilyPond could do that automatically.

Any suggestions welcome.

Urs

autosplit.png
Description: PNG image