shortened flags affair, part 3 - 32nds stem length

[Janek Warchoł]

Hi,

this is the next step of making stems and flags more beautiful:

i suggest making unbeamed 32nd stems a bit shorter than they are now.

The main reason for doing so is to better match the stem length of the beamed notes.

As we know, the optimal situation is when unbeamed stems are just a little bit longer than beamed stems, as in attached optimal.png.

Unfortunately, due to beam quanting it's not always possible to achieve this optimum.

However, i think we agree that unbeamed stems which are between 0 and 0.5 staffspace longer than beamed stems are acceptable. Unbeamed stems which are more than 0.5 staffspace longer than beamed ones are not good, and when the difference reaches 1 staffspace it becomes quite ugly, see ugly.png.

On the other hand, unbeamed stems shorter than beamed ones are not desired too.

I have evaluated current output and the results are here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/alsfo0

(red - unbeamed stem is 1 staffspace longer than beamed stem, orange - 0.75 staffspace longer)

As you can see, there is quite a lot of red and orange there.

Now what would it look like if we changed the length of the unbeamed 32nd notes to 4.25 ss (instead of 4.5)? Look here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/2mzt4a

Looks much better to me - no red, only orange. Unfortunately it introduces some yellow (unbeamed stem shorter than beamed one), but it's just a little. A lot more yellow exists in case of 16th notes, see here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/g96nuo

In addtion this will make the flagged 32nds look more balanced - the center of mass would be a little lower, and the (upstem) notes wouldn't look like tipping over (16ths and 64ths give very stable impression now).

Also, the sequence of lengths of 16th, 32nd and 64th notes would be more even, see "stems new" vs "stems old".

Therefore i call for shortening 32nd unbeamed notes by 0.25 ss. Do you agree?

cheers,

Janek

optimal.png
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ugly.png
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32nds proof sheet.ly
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stems old.PNG
Description: PNG image

stems new.PNG
Description: PNG image