First impressions of alpha test

[Keith E OHara]

What are everyone's first impressions of 2.13.34, the alpha test?

I remembered to run convert-ly (which worked for me, but I don't have MacOS 
10.4, where James W ran into trouble) but it made very few changes to scores 
written for 2.12.

The change that jumped out at me was the spacing, both of notes and staves.

Where 2.12 was too timid in trying to fit staves on a page, 2.13 sometimes tries to fit 
too many.  I had some "between-system-spacing/padding" assignments in the paper 
blocks, put there to encourage tighter spacing from 2.12. The docs indicate that the 
vertical spacing variables have changed their structure (I'll have to see if convert-ly 
flagged them for me) so I removed them, and was much happier with the output.

The horizontal spacing now quite aggressively tucks notes under/over the 
accidentals of the following notes.  Maybe I will not need to reduce 
shortest-duration-space any more. The space between the first or last note in a 
measure, and the neighboring barline, seems occasionally too tight -- but maybe 
I'll like that, once I get used to it.

The auto-beaming has changed, and seems to beam a little less often than the 
old system. The differences I saw were in tuplets, so I cannot yet say if there 
are any standard beams missing.

So I'm hopeful that the eventual 2.14 will have equivalently pretty output to 
2.12, with less need to override.  (Okay, more pretty; the lined-up instrument 
names at the left of the score are very nice.)  My hunch is that the default 
parameters, for the new spacing and auto-beaming systems, will get some 
adjustment after we find clean examples where adjustment is needed.

-Keith