Re: (Automatically) split partcombined voices to temporary staff

[Abraham Lee]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 9:41 AM, Abraham Lee <address@hidden> wrote:

Urs,

On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 9:29 AM, Urs Liska <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi all,

I have a question regarding complicated orchestral material. Note that I don't need a solution right now, only a plausible estimate if that's possible to implement at all.

Consider the situation of a staff with two partcombined voices (say, flutes). If there are spots (measures or ranges of measures) where the voices are so individualized or complex that the part combination becomes unreadable I would like to split this range (measure) to two individual staves.

The attached image shows the (manually constructed) intended result. Let's assume I would consider m. 7 too complex to be combined and therefore want the whole "current" system to be split in two staves.

The ideal way would be to have an automatic function that I can call within such a measure (tagging it as "non-combinable") that would:

• Determine in which system I'm currently in and from where to where it spans (i.e. previous and next line break)
  
• Create a temporary staff for exactly that range
• Copy the music of the second voice to that staff
• remove the second voice from the current staff
• (suppress partcombine texts)

In the potential score at hand the music will be maintained in a measure based grid. That means if I could get just the first of these (i.e.. determining the current and previous line breaks) I *might* be able to achieve something. But it would be a great feature (and a "selling point" for LilyPond) if we could integrate it. I got this request from a professional engraver who says it's a problem he's dealing with all the time: manually handling the combination and temporary splitting of voices in a staff - and especially fixing things if the line breaking happens to change. He said it would be a dramatic advantage if LilyPond could do that automatically.

Any suggestions welcome.

I believe this thread would interest you:

http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/Keep-alive-together-call-for-use-cases-tp193723.html

Best,

Abraham

Here's the official archived thread start:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2016-08/msg00256.html

and a message in that thread that shows a more complex example:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2016-08/msg00396.html

What it comes down to is the need to have a staff for all three scenarios:

1. Flute 1 staff

2. Flute 2 staff

3. Flute 1/2 combined staff

The examples demonstrate how to tell LP when/how to keep which staff alive, which conveniently doesn't require you to know which system the "non-combinable" passage ends up on. That is all handled automagically (Thanks, Mark!). You simply add a mark for where the "non-combinable" section starts and stops and LP handles the frenching.

Best,

Abraham