Re: Several issues transcribing ancient notation (clefs, noteheads, spacing)

[till]

Benedict Singer-2 wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm working on transcribing several ancient hymn tunes in ancient
> notation, and I've run across a few issues, listed below. I've been using
> Petrucci note heads and a clef, and mensural time signatures (and rests, I
> believe).
> 
> 1) Is there an easy way to reorder the clef and time signature? I'd like
> to swap the order they're currently printed in. If all else fails, I
> suppose some opposite X-offsets would do the trick.
> 
> 2) Is there a way to force minimal spacing of the noteheads. Basically, I
> don't want any sort of proportionality based on note duration, just
> noteheads placed one after another. The section on horizontal spacing
> didn't reveal anything to me, besides the bug note that there's no way to
> manually override spacing.
> 
> 3) The longa note. The source I'm working from has what looks like a
> longa, but the stem goes up instead of down. I tried briefly with \stemUp,
> but it didn't seem to respect that, leading me to believe that the stem is
> an integral part of the note glyph. Is this the case? If so, is there a
> way to replace the glyph for that note, with say, an EPS or SVG image?
> 
> 4) Related to the above; none of the available clefs quite match the
> source material. Can these also be replaced?
> 
> Thanks in advance for answers to any or all of these questions!
> 
> Ben
> 

Hi,

1. I don't really know what you want: do you want to print first the time
signature and then the clef? It probably goes only by shifting both against
each other manually.

2. There is a lot of threads here on the list. You can play with all sorts
of spacing but nothing is yet really convincing. The most simple workaround
appears to be to scale all note durations to a singe duration, eg. 1/8,
which can be achieved by appending the note duration: a\breve*1/8 will give
a breve that takes only the space of 1/8. It should be possible to write a
scheme expression that does this automatically, but I don't know how.

3. It is hard coded, I think. You could take the longa from the normal
notation which is just the breve with a stem going either down or up. I
would recall that the longa gets an upstem only in certain conditions inside
a ligature. Sure you can try to see what output you get with svg (Lilypond
is still able to produce that) but there might be font issues and it is a
hassle at the moment.

4. There are probably as many clefs as are sources or printers... The clefs
are designed as metafont chars, the definitions you can find in the Lilypond
source code in the parmesan files inside the mf folder of the source code.
You will want to read some information on metafont thought, before you start
redefining them, there is an online tutorial mftut.pdf and the sources of
the metafont book: mfbook.tex They can give you a start.
I have the purpose to improve the current fonts, but this might take its
time since I also don't know this language yet...

Greetings
Till

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