Re: Request for Big Time Signature

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

Hi Leo,

thanks for your kind words. I'm focusing my limited time on LilyPond
infrastructure, so I can't help you here, but I hope someone else from
the development community can. I took the liberty of including them on
this reply.

On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 6:37 AM Chen Leo <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hi Han-Wen,
>
> I am a new lilypond user and I have been using lilypond for a few months now. 
> I want to say that I love the experience (especially the way lilypond 
> automatically handles all the collisions and alignment problems with great 
> accuracy). I want to thank the development team for creating such amazing 
> software.
>
> One personal suggestion would be that I think lilypond can benefit from 
> implementing more contemporary notations e.g. more symbols and noteheads (I 
> was happy to hear that lilypond is considering adopting the SMuFL font 
> format). For most of the notation problems I have encountered, I was able to 
> solve by copying and modifying different snippets, thanks to the great 
> lilypond community. However, there’s one specific problem that I can’t seem 
> to find a solution to, even with the help of several lilypond users.
>
> The problem is to put large time signatures on top of (or in between) staves, 
> it is commonly used in a lot of contemporary scores which often feature 
> constant changes in time structures. In these situations, using this layout 
> will make the score look a lot clearer and save much horizontal space.
>
> I found
> http://lsr.di.unimi.it/LSR/Snippet?id=272
> which seems like a perfect solution initially. However, soon I was able to 
> find several problems with this snippet. (I will give examples for all of the 
> problems in the attached file)
> 1a. Time signatures get aligned to cue clefs instead of the bar line whenever 
> a clef change is made at the end of the bar.
> 1b. Time signatures appear twice when one staff has a grace note as the first 
> note in a bar while other staves do not.
> 1c. Space is not allotted for the cautionary time signatures before line 
> breaks so they always cross the left margin.
> 1d. shift-right-at-line-begin has a fixed X-offset value of 3.5 units, this 
> means that if the user decides to change the clef font size or to use an 
> alternative font the X-offset value won’t automatically change according to 
> the width of the clef symbol.
>
> I tried another approach afterward, which is to use
> \override TimeSignature.break-align-symbol = #'staff-bar
> This successfully solves problems 1 3 and 4 yet it also starts to cause more 
> problems since other staves are now aware of the time signature’s horizontal 
> space. The problems are:
> 2a. Parts of hairpins and spanners are missing below the time signatures 
> after a line break.
> 2b. Lilypond pushes everything to the left when \textLengthOn commands are 
> used on text script objects below the time signature.
> 2c. Same as problem 1b from the original snippet.
> 2d. Bar numbers are raised to the same height as the time signatures' dummy 
> staff while it should display on the top music staff. This problem can be 
> solved by removing "Bar_number_engraver" from the Score context and consists 
> of it only in the actual top staff’s context. Though this can cause some 
> problems if the user chooses to hide staves that don’t have a part in a 
> section of music and the top staff also happens to be one of the hidden 
> staves.
>
> After a long discussion, a kind lilypond user named Kevin Barry was able to 
> provide me with a solution that he thinks is somewhat “hacky” while it solves 
> problem 2a and 2c quite well. He wrote a custom engraver that replaces all 
> TimeSignature objects with TextScript objects except at the end of lines so 
> that space can be allotted for the cautionary time signatures (I’ve also 
> included his approach in the attached file). Problem 2b and 2d remain 
> unsolvable. Because the only solution to problem 2b is to set TextScript’s 
> extra-spacing-width property to #'(+inf.0 . -inf.0) while that means bars are 
> no longer sensitive to the TextScript objects’ width, it causes collisions 
> when time signatures exceed the barline. I wasn’t able to solve problem 2d as 
> well.
>
> Eventually, I decided to contact someone from the development team and I 
> found you.
> I hope that this can be improved and made into a snippet (or even better if 
> this gets implemented into lilypond in future versions) as using large time 
> signatures is really quite common in contemporary ensemble pieces.
>
> Here are some examples of how this layout can look like in different scores.
>
> Most scores have the time signatures vertically centered. e.g.
> Pierre Boulez - Répons
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aa8ogiwEV4
> Tristan Murail - La Barque Mystique
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te-R0eETD0c
>
> While some scores do not. e.g.
> Tōru Takemitsu - Rain Coming
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnaztoAdgWk
> Toshio Hosokawa – Vertical Song I
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji0gxsRp71M
>
> I hope that both options can be considered.
>
> Any help will be greatly appreciated!
>
> Best wishes,
> Leo