Re: Reasons for cross-voice limitations?

[Kevin Barry]

For sure the voice context limitations are a pain, and if I knew how, I
would write a function for starting and finishing slurs without the need
for creating a hidden voice, but I don't even know if it is possible. In my
own head, I imagine that LilyPond `thinks' in voices and there isn't much
that can be done about that. Practically 100% of my work is either piano
music or music reduced to two staves, so I bump up against this issue all
the time. I never use the part combiner.

I obviously don't know how necessary this limitation is, but iirc the old
DOS program SCORE required that the whole score be reentered for the
purposes of adding slurs.

How hard would it be to write a cross-voice slur function?

On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 6:49 PM, Urs Liska <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> this has been discussed numerous times, but I think I'll have to bring it
> up once more: the limitations that slurs, dynamics and other spanners can't
> cross voice borders. This limitation is a major inconvenience for users:
> New users are regularly confused, using hidden voices to work around the
> limitation is actually an ugly workaround, and it's not acceptable to be
> forced to use such workarounds for reasonably common things. And now I've
> come to suffer from an issue where this limitation is a real PITA: the
> partcombiner.
>
> I find it quite obscure to tame the partcombiner to do its work anyway
> (for example, when you're facing an issue you don't have a real way to tell
> what "mode" it currently is in because the last switch could have happened
> about anywhere, and in any of the voices taking part in the combination).
> But I've come to the conclusion that very often the partcombiner has to
> make ugly choices because it's bound to keep voice contexts alive during
> the whole spanners. Often it remains in partcombineApart mode for
> ridiculously long ranges, just because a slur has to be closed in the same
> voice as it has begun. And this kind of issue is usually sooo awkward to
> solve because you might end up inserting a hidden voice to achieve the
> slurring but have to restrict that to the partcombined staff while not
> using it for individual part printing etc.
>
> So I want to bring that up once more: Why do we still have this
> limitation? Is it an inherent problem that can't be fixed, is it just
> because noone cared (or had the chance) to fix it, or is it "only" because
> we didn't explicitly think about the right way to deal with it semantically
> and with regard to syntax?
> I mean, I can't imagine it makes a serious difference when it comes to
> *engrave* a slur. It may make a difference for managing and maintaining
> contexts, but just as it is possible to add a hidden voice to accomplish a
> cross-voice item it should be possible to create a built-in solution for
> that.
>
> This wouldn't fix the partcombiner limitations, but it would at least make
> it possible to think about improvements.
>
> Any ideas?
> Urs, frustrated ...
>
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