Re: truly elegant compound time signatures

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 04:04:50PM +0200, Joseph Wakeling wrote:
> Graham Percival wrote:
> > Mao, I added the comments just before sending the file, and forgot
> > that scheme used a different symbol for comments.
> > 
> > The attached file fixes this.
> 
> Very nice!  A couple of comments: first (I guess you know this) the
> bracketed (3+3+2) etc. markup should surely not affect the horizontal
> music spacing as it does.  Is there anything that can be done?

It's not markup.  I've changed the way the time signature is
displayed.  The parenthesis is part of the time signature.

> Second, from the point of view of documentation/snippets, it would be
> good to have one snippet displaying multiple different ways of viewing
> compound time signatures or beat divisions, everything from the form in
> this example,

Go ahead.

I'm not doing these for the documentation.  I'm doing these for my
own use.  Since I'm nice, I separate each tweak into its own file,
comment them, and send them here.  In fact, since I'm *very* nice,
I try to make the tweaks as general, and as easy to modify, as
possible.  My own music only has compound meters in 2s and 3s; the
previous solution of having two separate commands worked.  But I
spent an extra 3 hours creating a single command that could work
with any arbitrary number of compounds.

If somebody else finds them useful, great! -- but this is as far
as I go.  When LSR is updated to 2.12, I'll upload them, but
that's it.  I'm not going to create extra versions to help lazy
people understand them.  Anybody who has read LM 4 should be able
to see how these snippets work, and should be able to start
modifying them on their own.

Even worse, from a documentation point of view, some of my
snippets clearly obsolete other tweaks.  There's one "horizontal
placement of dynamics" snippet in particular that gives bad
advice... but that's not my problem any more.


I'm not trying to be nasty, but judging from your email, you don't
understand how the \compoundTimeSignature command works.  And you
have some interest in the docs, otherwise you wouldn't have
mentioned anything.  So why don't *you* create those other
versions of this command?  It'll be a good exercise for you, and
it could help other people understand this kind of thing.

If you run into trouble after an hour of reading the docs on
tweaking and experimenting with the file, feel free to ask
questions.

Cheers,
- Graham