Re: [GLISS] differentiating pre/post/neutral commands

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 01/09/12 17:25, Graham Percival wrote:
> Continuing to brainstorm on the problem of it not being obvious to
> which note a particular \command refers to, what if we used:
>
> \postfix:      c2 d\p  is unchanged
> /prefix: for music functions like   c2 /parenthesize d
> .neutral: for commands which aren't attached to notes, such
>    as .clef or .times.

Have to say that I think that there will be greater confusion down to having 3 
different ways to indicate a command, than there will be over what entity the 
command applies to.

After all, the general form of

     \command x

is easy to understand -- \command applies to the entity x, or alternatively to 
any group of entities contained in brackets { }.  I don't think it's confusing 
in general that x could be a note or some other entity.  (Are there good 
examples where it _is_ confusing?)

The tricky thing is when you have something like,

      c'4 \p c' c' c'

... but it's not actually as ambiguous as it seems given that all the commands 
of this nature refer to a particular type of musical object (a dynamic or an 
ornamentation or similar).  So it's not so difficult to appreciate that 
"commands of this type apply to the preceding note, others to the entity that 
follows".

But if you want to remove that ambiguity, there are other ways to do it:

    (1) Make a \command apply to the preceding note if there is no whitespace
        separating it from the preceding note, as in c'4\p

    (2) In addition to or as an alternative to the whitespace method, make it so
        that if a command is preceded by a hyphen - it applies to the previous
        note.  This is less ambiguous than your above suggestions because it
        preserves a common \backslash notation for _all_ commands while having
        a clear indicator that the command applies to the preceding note.

        So you could do something like:

                   c'4-. -\p -\< c' c' c'\!

        or equivalently,

                   c'4-.
                      -\p
                      -\<  c' c' c'\!

    (3) For commands that expect to apply to the preceding entity but which are
        in ambiguous form, e.g. c'4 \p, emit a warning or error asking the user
        to put an unambiguous indicator in the score, i.e. a preceding - or
        lack of preceding whitespace, or a following set of brackets { }.

    (4) For commands that expect to apply to the _following_ entity but which
        follow an earlier entity without whitespace, emit a warning asking the
        user to either remove the ambiguity with a preceding - or to correct
        the error by adding whitespace before the command.