Re: [Denemo-devel] Report on Copy and Paste LIlypond Directives (and Empty Measures for educational usage)

[Richard Shann]

On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 22:27 +0100, Nils Gey wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> A report:
> 
> I made a piece consisting of 4 staffs. One soprano, one bass. The other two I 
> wanted to be empty to compose further with a print out. 
> 
> Now if you leave a bar empty Denemo/Lilypond will fill in a rest. I used 
> "\skip 2." (its a 6/8) and this works fine, the bar is empty then. 
> This leads to 2 points:
> 
> 1. It would be handy to have some option to leave complete empty (even 
> without rests) measures blank If you wish. 
The script for doing this would need to enquire the current time
signature and then insert the appropriate \skip command, displaying
something to say that the measure is blank. The query functions are
mostly not done yet, unfortunately. But there is nothing problematic
here.
> Especially for composing  or educational practice this is usefull. Is there a 
> lilypond option for this? 
hmm, there may be something to do this (without having to know the time
signature, that is). Perhaps by using invisible ink - there is some
\override ... transparent ... stuff...
> Maybe it could be a staff property.
> 
> 2. I filled two measures with the lilypond command and wanted to copy and 
> paste the rest. 
> It is not possible to copy two measures only with the ly-directive and then 
> paste it to get two new empty measures 
> with the directive. Denemo just pasted the directives in one measure, 
> because there are no rests or anything written in between. I don't know what 
> to say, this is not really a bug,
>  but I wanted to mention that its not easily possible to copy empty measures 
> only with lilypond-directives in whole pieces.
What I guess is the case is that the select/copy/paste is just making a
list of objects, and measures in Denemo are not objects. This copy &
paste stuff is very important for people wanting to use Denemo for
composition, I never use it myself, as a plain music transcriber, so I
have never probed its code. Until we attract a programmer/composer I
wonder if we could do things with scripts
>  You have to select every new measure per hand and then paste it in.
For example, this could be done with a script, couldn't it? Generally,
if you can do it by hand you can do it by script, though you might start
to see functionality that it would be nice to have in scheme when doing
tha.
Richard