Re: [PATCH] tiny bits

[Juergen Reuter]

On Wed, 11 Sep 2002, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:

> > (2) I am *really* about renaming Stem property "flag-style" into
> > "flag-stroke" or "stroke-style" or "stroke", because it does not denote
> > the style of the flag, but rather the style of the stroke.  Then I also
> > could rename Stem property "style" into "flag-style", because this
> > property really describes the style of the flag, namely mensural, default,
> > etc.  However, "flag-style" is possibly be used by quite some lilypond
> > users, so I do not know if we may change here something that is not
> > backwards compatible.
>
> Sorry, I'm missing something here. Do you mean the vertical part by
> stroke?
>

No, I am talking about the diagonal lines that are drawn through flags
as applied on grace notes.

There are currently two problems.

Problem 1:
----------

In ly/grace-init.ly, you currently say:

\property Voice.Stem \override #'flag-style  = #"grace"

which means that a (single) stroke should be drawn across each flag.
I think this is a misnomer: firstly, from the user's perspective the
stroke is not a property of the Stem; secondly, it does not denote the
style of the flag (such as mensural versus default), but rather which kind
of stroke to add to the flag; thirdly, "grace" is a really bad name for a
value, since, IIRC, there are different possibilities of striking grace
notes, such as using double strokes.

Ideally, I think, flag would be a grob of its own; then you could
introduce a property "stroke" or "stroke-style" (as you prefer) on the
grob Flag:

\property Voice.Flag \override #'stroke = #"single"

Other possible values besides "single" could be "double" (for double
strokes) and "" (or "none" or "empty" or "default", as you prefer) for
turning off strokes at all (as is currently done with "\property
Voice.Stem \override #'flag-style  = #'()").

By the way, maybe backwards compatibility is not that big problem, since
by default, grace-init.ly already turns on single strokes.  Only those
lilypond users that explicitly turn off strokes (maybe not that many)
would suffer from such a change.

Problem 2:
----------

Since Stem property "flag-style" is already used for grace notes, ancient
font notation uses Stem property "style" to set the style of the flag.
This is also a misnomer, but there was no choice.  Similarly to problem 1,
I would like to say something like:

\property Voice.Flag \override #'style = #'mensural

to set the style of flags.

Greetings,
Juergen