Re: heuristics for picking neutral stem directions

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Russ Ross writes:

> I'd like to request a feature to address this, and I think it fits
> nicely with the philosophy of output being correct by default.

It's a good request, we have been thinking (maybe I should say:
dreaming) about such things once in while.

> would go a long way to improving the default output.  I'm not sure
> exactly what the rules should be,

I'm afraid that won't do.  You cannot implement an unknown algorithm.
Also, without it you cannot hope to predict what the impact might be.

> I'm not familiar with the code base, but hopefully this would
> be a relatively low impact feature as the decisions are all fairly
> local.

This would be the first feature that makes LilyPond context-aware so
to say, using the context of a note to change its stem orientation.

I think this is a quite difficult, but interesting, thing to do.
There are a lot of other interesting context-features you could
imagine: slur orientation, slur shape, beam orientation, length of
stems, etc.

Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org