Re: Constructive Criticism and a Question

[Trevor Bača]

On 12/20/06, Kress, Stephen <address@hidden> wrote:
> Ok.  Based on what everyone has been saying and seeming to come to an
> agreement on, here's the details of the changes that we are proposing be
> made.
>
>  1.  \times is replaced by \tuplet since tuplet makes more musical sense and
> convert-ly can easily be updated to make the change.  Because of convert-ly,
> there's not a real reason (other than the status quo people are used to) to
> keep \times around.
>
>  2.  The first argument to \tuplet may be either a ratio (more
> understandable to musicians) or a division (as is currently supported).  The
> punctuation between the two numbers marks what it is.  A single number will
> not be supported.
>
>  3.  The second argument remains an arbitrary musical expression.  There is
> no reason to force the expression to contain only the "proper" duration of
> notes since LP is already built to engrave this situation properly.
>
>  4.  By default, a single number will be engraved in the tuplet bracket.
> There is already the text property of the TupletNumber object that can be
> tweaked to get the ratio printed if one so desires.  In other words, no
> changes need to be made to LP in how the single number vs. ratio engraving
> is done; LP already does it right.

The first three of these suggestions make great sense.

But could we please change #4?

Note that, today, the expression

 \times 3/5 { c'16 c'16 c'16 c'16 c'16 }

prints with a lone "5" above the backet. A lone 5 is interpreted as an
abbreviation of "5:4" and not as "5:3". This means that hte output is
not merely typographically incorrect but musically incorrect.

(The solution in the current implementations of the program is to
override TupletNumber to a fraction, which definitely does work.
However, this means that we have a rare example of a case where Lily's
default behavior is actually musically incorrect.)

If we're going to change tuplet input and rendering behavior, I think
a better version of #4 might be something like "print, by default, a
lone integer over the bracket, except where a lone integer is
musically incorrect, in which case print the ratio over the bracket".

See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2006-11/msg00514.html



--
Trevor Bača
address@hidden