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Re: Barline scans


From: Marnen Laibow-Koser
Subject: Re: Barline scans
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2007 10:54:53 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.9 (Macintosh/20041103)

Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
When designing bar
lines, we were looking for a practice that was backed by big houses,
but also something interesting or exceptional(ly beautiful), rather
than something too common and `looking also ok'.

Hmm. I wonder if this was in fact the right way to go: exceptional editions are...well...exceptions. As I pointed out to Han-Wen, Bärenreiter is an extremely idiosyncratic edition, perhaps too much so to be a useful model.


Then this may be current practice.  In that case, shouldn't Lilypond
keep up with the times?


I'm not sure, can you tell me?

I'm not sure either, but it's a question that should be asked. Certainly many engraving practices (such as accidental usage) have changed substantively in the last century or so, and it would not be wise to follow the older practice now. I don't know if this is one of those cases.

We should not close our eyes to new
practices, but look why things change rather than blindly following.
LilyPond was started because we felt that current practice was going
down, quality-wise.

I know that. I'm not sure I entirely agree with that assessment, but then I take great pride in the quality of my own engraving, and perhaps I haven't seen enough of the truly bad stuff out there. So maybe I'm seeing a skewed sample, because most of the recent work I see is my own -- and I make sure my own is of as high a quality as I know how to produce.

[...]
I am trying to offer constructive suggestions so that Lilypond can
come closer to its stated goals.


Okay, I'm very glad to hear that.  Also, I apologise if I was a bit
harsh.

Likewise. You set yourselves high standards in this project, and that's why I'm being this tough.

Similarly, I set myself high standards in my work. I'm currently exploring Lilypond with ultimate thought to replacing Finale -- I prefer free tools wherever possible. But I get very good output from Finale (far better than the specious example you criticize on your website, which even contains errors that Finale would have fixed automatically given half a chance), and so far I am not sure that I see a way of getting comparable quality from Lilypond without an inordinate amount of tweaking.

You put quite some effort in something that I haven't looked
at for years, which is a very good thing.

Happy to help. And you and Han-Wen encouraged me to learn a bit more about an area of engraving where my knowledge had been less than adequate, which is also a very good thing.



I'm biased because I have a preference?  That's ridiculous.  I didn't


(No offence intended, but it is a quite masterful mind that is not
biased when it has made strong judgments.)

Um, the judgement was made only *after* seeing a practice that seemed unattractive. I did not have any preconceived notions going into this: I might as easily have said "Thick barlines! How beautiful!" The fact that I did not was purely based on my aesthetic reaction in the moment of seeing Lilypond's barlines for the first time.

Obviously, you like thick barlines. Should I call you biased in the other direction?

[...]
> So what you find ugly *cannot*
be the bar lines in itself: it must be that you see something else.

It cannot be *only* the barlines, true. There must be another piece of the puzzle.

It could be artifacts of you printer, it could be a font or spacing
issue.  Can you try to find what that is?

I believe I mentioned in an earlier post that my objection to Lilypond's barlines may well have had to do with how they fit into the overall look and color of the page. I'll be happy to dig out my Bärenreiter and Peters scores and see what I can come up with; unfortunately, I don't have many of either edition.

But as an example, Henle's barlines are quite thick (though not so much as those of Lilypond). However, the overall look of Henle's notation is quite a bit darker and more assertive than that of Lilypond, so the thick barlines fit in.

I do not believe that Lilypond's thick barlines fit in well with the overall look of the notation. If I can figure out a way of measuring that numerically, I will.

[...]
As I recall, Feta looks very little like Bärenreiter notation.  If you
want to mimic Bärenreiter, perhaps an overhaul of the font is in order
-- after all, all the graphic details are interdependent to some
degree.


No, I'm afraid that we cannot do that even if we would like to.

If this is correct, then it is probably a waste of effort to try to mimic half of Bärenreiter's practice without the other half -- after all, the page is a coherent whole, and changing one aspect without changing another could conceivably lead to very bad results.

I'm not sure, however, that it is correct. I can't think of a provision of copyright law that would forbid it, and I'm not necessarily suggesting an exact copy, just something that preserves the principles that you admire. Certainly fonts cannot be copyrighted in any effective way -- how could you copyright something even more amorphous (as layout practices surely are)?

I'm
not even sure if we can say that we mimick Bärenreiter's bar lines
(copyright-wise) but it is probably OK to be inspired editions of a
select group of publishers.

Sure.  Just be sure that the resulting practice is sound...


Greetings,
Jan.


Best,
Marnen





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