Engraving a musical theater score and I've got a handful of spots that have some ad lib./"wild" harp glisses (as seen in the example images below.) Does anyone have a good reliable/reusable way to engrave these without needing to manually adjust the positions of the glissando spans for every single instance? I've got more than just two situations where this is used, so I'm thinking some kind of function or engraver, but I'm still getting comfortable with extending LilyPond and writing those kinds of things.
Dear Steph,
I am not sure if you have been helped here or if you figured something out. But in case none of that has happened yet:
I see this as an excellent opportunity to become more familiar with Scheme, as well as Postscript (I do know, however, that the LilyPond manual states that the Postscript should be used as the last resort when making a markup…). With that in mind, in the attached .ly file, you will see two examples. Both examples draw a same squiggly line using Postscript code via \markup, which is then attached to the notehead via grob-transformer, attached to NoteHead.stencil.
First example is a hard-coded one where you can invoke the variable and it would draw the same shape every time you do so.
The second example shows a possibility where you can add arguments to alter some parameters in the Postscript code, taking advantage of some Scheme functions. In that example, I decided to turn the thickness of the line as an argument. This means that, depending on what kind of arguments you set, you can change the shape of the curve, you can set how many curves you want, how long the line as a whole should be, etc. etc..
This was the approach I took in one of the snippets (Slashed Notehead) I made as part of the contemporary notation cookbook I announced in the mailing list a few days ago. And I took the inspiration for that from a code that Jean Abou Samra made in this thread:
Good luck!!!!
Yoshi