Re: Incipits

[Juergen Reuter]

Hi all,

as far as I understand, all problems with incipits boil down to the 
following two major issues:

  (1) horizontal spacing, and

  (2) the system start delimiter.

Karl's solution unfortunately leaves horizontal space between the incipit 
and the actual score; hence it does *not* solve issue (2).  Rather, the 
score lines should not stop inbetween.

IMHO, all other features have been quite well demonstrated in template 
A.5.1 for a while now.  Hence, you probably should concentrate on solving 
these two remaining issues.

Regarding issue (2), maybe the "right" solution is to extend the system 
start delimiter implementation in such a way, that

  (a) automatic printing at the system start may be suppressed for a
      specific range of the score with kind of
      "\turnSystemStartDelimiterOff" and "\turnSystemStartDelimiterOn"
      commands, and

  (b) a kind of "\bar #'system-start-delimiter" command prints an
      additional system start delimiter whereever you want.  (But if this
      bar should happen to appear at the system start, the delimiter
      should not be printed twice.)

Regarding issue (1), I am not sure what the "right" solution is.  Please 
note that the note durations in the incipit are typically much larger than 
in the actually score.  Karl and Nicolas, did you check what happens with 
the horizontal spacing in your incipit solutions, if you double or 
quadruple the note durations in the incipit (and only there)?  In your 
examples, in the incipts you are unfortunately using the same durations as 
in the actual score.  I may be wrong, but I suspect that your solutions do 
*not* solve issue (1).

IIRC, the spacing engine maintains a variable that keeps track of shortest 
available duration in a peace in computes the ideal distance of larger 
note values in a logarithmic scale based on the shortest duration.  Maybe 
this computation needs to be changed for the incipit (and only there!) to 
get tighter spacing in the incipit.

Greetings,
Juergen