Phrased plainchant

[Don Blaheta]

After last night's emails I realised that the _real_ problem I was
having was with the fact that the bars were ticking away according to an
irrelevant time signature.  It turns out that I was able to solve quite
a few of my longstanding issues by attacking that directly.  I'm
actually pretty happy with the result (though there's still one
particularly clunky thing and a couple somewhat annoying error messages
I don't fully understand), and wanted to share it and ask some questions
about it.

First, let me lay out what it does.  I'm setting some church chants in a
more or less modern notation, with modern note heads but no stems or
flags, and on a modern staff.  There are bars, but they separate phrases
rather than measures.  And I wanted to include running translation that
was synched by phrase rather than by note.  (This last problem was the
one I solved first, and proved to be the way to bootstrap the other
stuff.)

Attached are the two files that set all this up.  The header file is for
including at the top of the .ly file, and defines a number of useful
commands.  The footer file is for including inside the \score; it turns
off some of the engravers.  After you've included these files, you write
out your melody, enclosing every chunk of it with a \phrase{ ... }
marker, and following each with a bar command (e.g. \divisioMinima).  The
bar commands have the same names as the ones in gregorian-init but are
only distant relatives: rather than breaths, they are actually bar lines
with the stencil changed.  Which means they space themselves very
nicely.  The flipside of this is that if you have a phrase boundary
where you don't want a bar line you *must* say \noBar.  You also can't
have any notes that aren't part of a \phrase or the bars get all out of
sync.  The lyrics you set just as usual, but the phrase translations you
put in a \phraseLyrics (or \italPhraseLyrics) and just include each
individual phrase in quotes.  That part looks clean and is pretty cool.
Also attached is a sample file that makes use of the main features.

Here are the questions.

First, the way that I aligned the phrase text was to make an invisible
note that's exactly as long as the phrase, and make the phrase text the
lyric for that note.  That strikes me as horribly clunky, but I couldn't
figure out any other way to peg the lyric to a length of time in a
Voice.  Is there a better way?

Second, and related, if you compile that you'll notice a bajillion
complaints about a weird minimum distance.  That's because I falsed the
stencil for the dummy note; if I let the dummy notes be visible, then
all I get is a couple of clashing note columns.  Why is that?  Is there
any way to make the errors go away?

Third, and completely unrelated, I think, is that I tried simply
removing the Stem_engraver, but that also made the program spit out a
bunch of error messages ("programming error: no stem for note column")
*and* it screws up the slurs so that they are touching the note heads,
for some reason.  So instead, I have to override the stem's stencil to
be #f.  But, shouldn't removing the stem engraver be the right thing to
do here?  Why would not having a stem cause the slurs to draw
incorrectly, when they're not even touching where the stems would be?

Actually, also a fourth question, though I suspect the answer is "you
can't": I'd like the left edges of the Latin and the translations to be
aligned.  I tried adding a \once \override to the beginning of each
phrase to make the first lyric left-aligned, but that made the music
move into an awkward spacing... what I really want is just to move the
phrase translation over to line up with the left edge of the first lyric
(which would itself remain centred on its note).  It seems unlikely, but
is there any hope of that?

-- 
-=-Don address@hidden<http://www.blahedo.org/>-=-
_Quod erat demonstratum_: Latin for "I told you so."    --The Java Handbook

plainchant-head.ly
Description: Text document

plainchant-foot.ly
Description: Text document

sanctus-sample.ly
Description: Text document