Re: How to move noteheads to the left? (was: Re: How to add double barlines to a gregorian chant?)

[Dominic Neumann]

As nobody has answered by now, I´ve been going on searching a solution
myself. The way I did it now is not what I would call a "clean
solution", but it produces an output that´s at least a little bit
better. The price we have to pay is much manual work.

If I put
    \once \override NoteHead #'extra-offset = #'(1 . 0)
before EVERY not of a melisma and
    \once \override NoteHead #'extra-offset = #'(#-2 . 0)
before the note after the melisma, it´s a bit better.
I also added
    \once \override LyricText #'X-offset = #-3
before the syllable that belongs to the note after the melisma.

This works reasonably. Now I wanted to improve the handling of it
because the many \once \override commands are not that nice to look
at. I tried to introduce a music function for it, taking the value of
the x-offset:

moveNH =
#(define-music-function (parser location offset)
                        (number?)
  #{
      \once \override NoteHead #'extra-offset = #'($offset . 0)
  #})

But I get a warning, that extra off-set hat to be of the type "pair of
numbers". It seems that I cannot only set one part of the pair from
outside, but I don´t want to say \moveNH #'(2 . 0) instead of \moveNH
#2 !
How can I solve this?

Dominic

2008/8/1 Dominic Neumann <address@hidden>:
> 2008/7/31 Dominic Neumann <address@hidden>:
>> 2008/7/30 Joseph Haig <address@hidden>:
>>> An even more
>>> unfortunate side effect of this is that if you have long melimata the
>>> spacing gets messed up, because lilypond allocates a certain amount of
>>> space for each neume even though they are clustered together.  You can
>>> see this in your example, where the notes above 'unheil' have too much
>>> space between them.
>>
>> That´s really ugly and I hope to find a way to solve it. Without that
>> problem the chant results are considerable - maybe because I don´t
>> have difficult constructs to typeset. Unaesthetic source code is
>> annoying, but unaesthetic output is unacceptable ...
>>
>
> As I have to complete some chants in the next days, I am willing to
> work with some tweaks to solve this, because I cannot wait for the
> time when LilyPond will do it itself. By now, I´m only able to move
> the lyrics to better positioned under a melismata. I only set \once
> \override LyricText #'X-offset = #-1 before the corresponding syllable
> and this works quite good. But moving the next notehead to left isn´t
> possible by now.
>
> I tried to set \once \override NoteHead #'X-offset = #-1 before the
> note being printed after the melisma, but it only takes effect if you
> give positive values to it. The the offset gets bigger, but giving
> negative values doesn´t change anything.
> \once \override NoteColumn #'force-hshift = #5 obviously only works in
> polyphonic contexts, not here.
>
> What can I do?
>
> Dominic
>