Re: Place text next to rehearsal mark, or with left edge over barline if there is none

[Wols Lists]

On 10/07/17 18:35, Simon Albrecht wrote:
> On 10.07.2017 15:41, Wols Lists wrote:
>> On 09/07/17 21:20, Simon Albrecht wrote:
>>> On 09.07.2017 21:21, Wols Lists wrote:
>>>> Maybe, but placing all related marks one after the other is just as
>>>> semantically correct as placing them one on top of the other ...
>>> That’s nonsense, and it is for the same reason that it’s not a trivial
>>> decision to loosen horizontal alignment in general.
>> Why's it nonsense? "semantics" to me means "meaning", and if I see a
>> bunch of marks grouped together, they mean (to me at least) that they
>> all apply together. The fact that they are sequential rather than
>> stacked is irrelevant.
> 
> In tempo marks, horizontal position is related to semantics. If you
> place the tempo indication over a different moment, it means something
> different. What’s so hard to get about that? Or are you suggesting
> spreading the notes out by the entire width of the MetronomeMark? (I
> can’t think of tempo indications so short that this wouldn’t be
> ridiculous.)

No. I just view a markup block as exactly that - a block. So what if it
consists of several individual marks stacked horizontally. To me, a
tempo mark always belongs *after* a rehearsal mark if they collide, not
above it. And I can't remember whether the melody name goes above or
below the tempo.

I think I get your point a bit, though, in that I expect to see the
rehearsal mark above the barline. Iirc it's often left-justified, though ...
> 
>>> If you shift a tempo indication a tiny bit to the side, it makes no
>>> difference. But if it’s a
>>> slightly larger bit, such as the width of a quarter note, then the tempo
>>> change applies to a different moment. And preservation of semantic
>>> information (almost) always has to take precedence over elegant layout.
>>>
>>>>> Finally, these two statements are contradictory:
>>>>>
>>>>>       A real engraver who wanted to stick to those conventions would
>>>>>       presumably shift the note to the right
>>>>>
>>>>>       wasted white space is high on my list of priorities
>>>>>
>>>> How come? Shifting the notes to the right wastes maybe one
>>>> note-width of
>>>> one stave. Stacking marks on top of each other wastes an entire line of
>>>> text - bad enough in portrait music but appalling in landscape (where
>>>> saving space tends to be extremely important - the music is only A5 to
>>>> start with!)
>>> It’s obvious that your use case is special in its extremely tight
>>> restrictions on paper size and page turns. So I’m afraid you have to
>>> lower your expectations as to how well Lily will cope with that special
>>> situation in difficult circumstances. I assume you’re aware of
>>> possibilities like
>>>
>>> \paper {
>>>    page-count = 2
>>>    system-count = 10
>>>    systems-per-page = 5
>>> }
>>>
>>> – your use case might take benefit from specifying _all three_ of these.
>>>
>> And this would gain me what? Loads of wasted white space? On a bandstand
>> that's probably not *too* bad, but I was recently playing and a single
>> sheet of A4 was a nightmare!
> 
> Look, I understood from your previous e-mails that your usecase
> sometimes requires fitting the music on exactly two pages of A5 so they
> may be used for marching. Is that correct?

Marching it has to be a single side of A5. Anything else is just
impractical (as I found out a week ago :-)

Playing on a bandstand, two sides of A4 is okay, three at a pinch (on
three sheets of paper stuck together!), and four is a real pain. I'd
rather cram it on to one, than spread it over two.

> If you face such a situation and Lily by default spaces the music out to
> three pages, you can specify page-count to force it on two pages. In
> such tight constraints, the spacing algorithms often produce better
> results if you also specify the total number of staves as well as the
> number of staves on each page. If you have trouble applying that to your
> real-world example, maybe try to understand it better by reading it up
> in the Notation Reference, or ask back with an actual example.

I've done that. Lily seems to be doing much better in that regard,
recently, but in my experience it often seems to give up with "no can
do" (as I say, recent experience is much better).
> 
>> Lilypond claims to be "a system for producing beautiful music". The
>> reality seems to be it's a system for producing standard orchestral
>> music. Fact is, there are a lot of traditions out there besides the
>> traditional western orchestra, and by default lilypond seems to have
>> great headaches handling what - to a lot of people - is perfectly normal
>> music typesetting.
>>
>> Take for instance marks! I can't remember why I had the four marks that
>> I mentioned earlier, but a large minority of the pieces I play will have
>> three - a rehearsal mark, a tempo mark, and a melody name. Oh - and
>> given that they typically go up to a rehearsal mark somewhere near S or
>> P, and I've known AA and beyond, I don't think cramming them in to two
>> pages will work :-)
>>
>> At the end of the day, people want to use lilypond to produce beautiful
>> music - like me! But to argue that the orchestral *tradition* is "the
>> final arbiter" of what is right or wrong is simply going to put peoples'
>> backs up.
> 
> How did I suggest that a certain tradition was the ‘final arbiter’?

To quote yourself - "Well, both are placed exactly according to standard
conventions:" - I think you left out the word "orchestral" :-)

 The
> final arbiter is always legibility, and it so happens that traditional
> engravers of orchestral parts have achieved a very high standard in
> legibility.

Said standards don't work well in non-orchestral situations :-)

 Producing high-quality parts is difficult enough for an
> orchestral setting where parts are normally larger than A4, there is no
> wind, no rain, and page turns are possible at appropriate locations. I
> totally accept yours as a valid use case, and still you have to admit
> that the constraints you cite are making the task much more difficult.
> You can only cram so much music on a page while keeping optimal
> legibility, and if you try to exceed that amount, Lily will choke. There
> are countless possibilities to deal with this situation, but no magical
> ones to solve all problems without drawbacks.
> 
>>   Face it. I (and the OP) are trying to use lilypond. It's not
>> making our lives easy, because it comes from a different tradition to
>> us. And to claim that we're wrong because we're experienced musicians
>> who've never seem music like you describe (and let's face it, I very
>> rarely see music like you describe) doesn't make you look good.
>>
>> Different traditions, different expectations. I know lilypond is a
>> tricky tool if you don't work with its assumptions. But don't tell us
>> we're wrong just because we're different.
> 
> Please reread what I wrote: ‘It’s obvious that your use case is special
> in its extremely tight restrictions on paper size and page turns. So I’m
> afraid you have to lower your expectations as to how well Lily will cope
> with that special situation in difficult circumstances.’ Does that
> statement discriminate against the expertise of wind band musicians? I
> don’t think so.

Problem is, I don't think my use case is special, I think yours is :-)
> 
> Do you maybe have an example of what you’re trying to reproduce and how
> Lily fails at it? This whole discussion is way too inconcrete.
> 
I just want to do what the OP wants - tempi and tune names should work
well together with rehearsal marks. It just seems to me that whenever I
need them together, I end up fighting lily to get a good-looking
solution, when the whole point of lily is "it should just happen". Lily
doesn't like multiple marks together. I don't know if it's the majority
but it certainly feels like that's the norm in most of the pieces I work
with.

(If you look at the OP's example, both the tempo and the tune name are
aligned with the first note? So why don't both, or neither, collide with
the rehearsal mark? Yes I may be being slightly facetious but the result
is inconsistent.)

And all too often, because the lily space seems mostly to be orchestral
people, I feel us odd-balls get pushed back with "well it works for us".
Yes, I know, I'm a grumpy old man :-)

Cheers,
Wol