Fixed width measures

[Andrew Bernard]

Greetings all,

I have asked this question on the list in the past, but no solution seems to be available. The topic is fixed width measures. I have contemporary music that has lots of complex tuplets within tuplets and rapidly varying time signatures (New Complexity School). The composer I am working with draws all his scores by hand, and uses a fixed measure width notation to help the performer understand the very complex rhythms, with a fixed physical measure length corresponding to a specific fixed interval of time. Actually, several composers do this.

I have tried everything to do with proportional notation and new spacing sections but I can’t seem to succeed. Is there any way to instruct lilypond to use a fixed length, absolute size measure?

I see that others have wanted this capability for fixed width measures for chord charts, overriding the lovely and subtle way that lilypond has of moving the bar lines on the page around a little for readability and aesthetics.

I am attaching the smallest most simplified snippet I can make that shows unequal measures. If anybody can make something like this have fixed width measures, let me know!

I am aware that this goes entirely against classical engraving principles, and all of lilypond’s aesthetic architecture, but it is 2015 now! Does this require internal code hacking of the layout engine somewhere deep down below the user level? It’s frustrating to be defeated by a man with a pencil who can simply rule lines! :-)

Andrew

unequal-measures.ly
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