Re: fermata over rest, tempo positioning, solo/tutti

[James E. Bailey]

On 12.09.2008, at 08:01, jo.clarinet wrote:

I don't actually want/need the first bar numbered - just 5, 10 etc. I

think the problem here is I simply don't understand what each bit of the

process means, whereas the other LilyPond commands I've encountered so far

seem more straightforward. I'm not really a technologically-minded person

and have never done anything like this before. Looking at the commands

above, which do I now need to leave out - and where do I insert these

commands?

Thanks,

Jo

Lilypond manuals expect a fair bit of assumption. The first assumption is that everyone reads the entire manual. (I don't think I'll ever read chapter 6). The second assumption is that you read the code and try and deduce what it does.

Two persons here (myself included) posted this exact snippet from the manuals:

http://kainhofer.com/~lilypond/Documentation/user/lilypond/Bar-numbers.html#Bar-numbers

% Print a bar number every second measure

\set Score.barNumberVisibility = #(every-nth-bar-number-visible 2)

Reading that, there are some assumptions: the reader knows what a comment is; the reader has read the entire section of the documentation that this snippet is in. It's actually not that difficult to understand (if you have no difficulties understanding english.)

The first line tells you what's happening: instructions on how to print a bar number every 2 measures. The second line is what would need to be entered in order to do that. There are times when I see scheme code or functions in lilypond that I really don't understand, but, I know what I want. In this case, you want to show bar numbers every five measures. Looking at the above snippet, there are two explicit numbering words used: "second", in the first line, and "2" in the second line. It would be safe to assume that the "2" in the second line is what determines how often the bar numbers are shown. Even if I'm not sure, I take the guess, copy/paste the code into my file (using the lilypond code available on the website as a template for where to place it) and change what I think would be correct to get the results I want. Sometimes I'm successful, sometimes I'm not. If not, I try two things.

First, I change the code in my file to give exactly the same output as in the documentation. If that works, then I know I'm just changing the wrong things, and I need to look for other examples to see the differences in what's changed. If that doesn't work, then I copy the exact snippet from the lilypond documentation into a new file and beginning adding the things that are specific to my music until I get a snippet that does what I want it to do. If that doesn't work, then I have a minimal snippet that shows exactly what I'm trying to do, and where it's failing, and I can post it here and ask questions.

I hope this helps you to understand reading the documentation and adapting it to your personal use.

james