Re: incipit in 2.12: some remarks

[Trevor Daniels]

"Stefan Waler" <address@hidden> wrote

> Trevor Daniels wrote:
> > Yes, unfortunately there is no one in the doc team that has the
> > knowledge and/or time to write this section at the moment.  Would you be 
> > interested in preparing some text for this?
> > A few paragraphs of straight text and a couple of examples
> > sent to me would be fine.
>
> Hmmm, I could do this but I don't know what the reasons were for removing 
> the existing documentation?

I don't think there ever was any documentation for incipits.
This was just a place-holder for the future.  Or were you
thinking of the Transcription of mensural music template?  This
is now in Appendix A.5.1 to the Learning Manual.

> Would it mean just referring to the snippets or print the whole incipit 
> function once again in the documentation?

It would need some text to explain the general approach to
writing incipits (ie removing barlines, setting the style of
clefs, noteheads, rests, etc), then a discussion of the two possible
solutions shown in the snippets, the first being the one shown
in "Ancient notation template - modern transcription of mensural
music" (the template referenced above), the second being the
one shown in "Transcription of Ancient music with incipit", which
uses the InstrumentName to hold the incipit.  Finally, the
advantages of the incipit function shown in "Incipit" should be
discussed.

No need to replicate the snippets - they can be pulled in
automatically under Selected snippets.  All I really need
from you is the text, roughly as described above, or any way
you like if you can think of a better way.

> > I don't think the incipit function in the snippet titled "Incipit" 
> > actually sets the neomensural style itself - this
> > seems to be set in the music supplied to the function.  So using
> >
> > \override Rest #'style = #'neomensural
> >
> > in the music should work.  I'll see if I can fix this.
>
> No, I don't think it's part of the music - there's nothing about it. Maybe 
> it's achieved by this instruction in the incipit function:
>
> 'context-type 'MensuralStaff

Yes, this should do it, as it forces MensuralVoice, but I
see that MensuralVoice sets the note head style to 'petrucci
but does not set the rest style to 'mensural.  I'll look into
this.

> (BTW, I was slightly too quick here in my last posting - the style for 
> notes and time signature is *mensural*, not neomensural.)

OK

> If you fix this: do you think it's easily possible to remove the 
> horizontal spacing for any durations? In mensural notation you would never 
> let any space for rests or longer notes etc. (also means that the 
> individual staffs should be independent of each other in this regard)

I think spacing is one of the remaining issues.  Should be mentioned
as an issue in the text.

> > There are still some issues with incipits, I believe, so this
> > snippet should be regarded as just a possible approach.  For the same 
> > reasons this will probably not be included as a standard function.
>
> OK - but given the two issues above are fixed, it's a 99.9% approach :-)
> Anyway, I can live with that.

Rest style is easy; spacing probably not doable at present.

> Stefan

Trevor