Re: Absolute Beginners

[Manuel]

Am 26/12/2006 um 02:39 schrieb Geoff Horton:

> > You can, of course, change these and all other defaults; indeed you
> > can engrave old plainchant, contemporary notation, orchestral scores,
> > do MIDI files, and more. But all that lies further down the road. For
> > the moment, we will teach you how to engrave a simple melody.
>
> Plainchant engraving doesn't work well at the moment, so you might
> want to omit mentioning it here.


Doesn't it? I have seen so much material concerning it, that I find  
it somehow strange, I thought it would be in an advanced state of  
development. But if you say so...


> > You can analyze the exercise and see that the first note e appears a
> > third above middle c rather than a sixth below; the same happens with
> > the following g in relation to the preceding e; then comes a c a
> > fourth above the g instead of a fifth below, an so forth.
>
> "then comes a c a" is confusing. It looks at first glance as if both
> "a"s are pitches, not the English indefinite article. I can't come up
> with a good way to fix this at the moment.

Yes, I thought of that too, and I intend to solve the problem if and  
when I get to format the layout for a .pdf  document. It should be no  
big problem. For the moment, I think I shall just break the lines, like:

then comes a

c

a fourth above


another possible solution in TextEdit being the use of double quotes,


then comes a "c" a fourth above


> > You change the clef changing the term "treble" to
>
> Would "word" be better than "term"? Also, the most recent preceding
> example used an alto clef. If the examples are numbered, you could
> refer to the one you want.


I have changed it to "word" and then to "term". I don't mind changing  
it back to "word" if it is better than "term".


> > You can amuse yourself writing all possible and also impossible
> > examples of simple melodies, and see what happens. Don't worry,
> > whatever you type, you can't break it...
>
> I would change that last sentence, because it is easy enough to type
> things that won't compile, and a new user might well regard that as
> "breaking it".


Fine, I will suggest another way of putting it, maybe like:

...even if it can't compile, the program will not crash.

(if this it true, of course). There has been another suggestion in  
this concern, I'll look it up.


> > (Please note that this is not necessarily the way you are used to
> > naming the notes, just a quick, logical and easy way to work with
> > LilyPond.)
>
> Can you perhaps add something like: "If you would prefer to use more
> familiar names, see the section in the manual on "note names in other
> languages.""?

Sure!

What is the exact name of the manual and the section number or title?

But it's getting late again and I thing I'm going to bed now.


Manuel