Re: Changing voice order...

[Alexander Kobel]

On 2016-10-28 12:31, David Kastrup wrote:
> Alexander Kobel <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > On 2016-10-27 23:38, David Kastrup wrote:
> > > The majority tends to be silent.
> >
> > Minority report out of the silent majority:
> > I got used to the status quo, which is totally natural once you
> > internalized the meaning of \voice<Digit>.
>
> Well, walking on your hands is totally natural once you internalized
> being upside down.

Also, walking on your hands is easier than standing on them. I'm still 
waiting for that... ;-)

> The problem I have is that all of the the <Digit>s
> in \voice<Digit> stop making sense as soon as _one_ <Digit> moves past
> Two.

I wouldn't say that it stops making sense at all, but it's a different 
sense than the one you expect from a musical point of view. So, yes, I 
get your point.

> > I agree with you that these names are semantically suboptimal. On the
> > other hand, I find something like \inner \VoiceUp etc. slightly too
> > verbose; I'll get used to it, but I can't say I'm too fond of it.
>
> Better proposals welcome.  My first idea was \voiceUpUp but that does
> not work since additional voices are inner voices.  And \voiceUpDown and
> \voiceUpDownDown would again be rather confusing.  So the idea with
> \inner as a modifier.  Replacing \inner \inner with \innermost suffers
> from the problem that the innermost level might be either further out or
> in.

What about \voiceUp<Digit> and \voiceDown<Digit>? Where the former are 
counted from top to bottom, and the latter from bottom to top? So the 
current \voice<n> becomes \voice<n%2 ? Up : Down><ceil(n/2)> ?
Or \<ordinal>FromTop and \<ordinal>FromBottom?

> > > I am a radical conservative: I want to keep everything the way it should
> > > have been from the start.
> >
> > If that's the goal: I again agree with you that top-to-bottom makes
> > the most sense IMHO; but either the << ... \\ ... \\ ... >> just
> > assigns names, not styles, or you should also think about some
> > syntactic sugar to specify the boundary between "up" and "down"
> > voices. Something like
> >   <<
> >     topmost \\ 2nd from top
> >     \\\ % note the three backslashes
> >     topmost stem-down \\ middle stem-down \\ bottom stem-down
> >   >>
> > which would translate to << 1 \\ 3 \\ 6 \\ 4 \\ 2 >>...
>
> So does
>
> << topmost \\ 2nd from top
>    \\ { \inner \inner \voiceDown topmost stem-down }
>    \\ middle stem-down \\ bottom stem-down
> > >
>
> Basically you need to only fix those voices not obeying the standard
> scheme (usually just one) and the rest will work out.  So I don't really
> think that a special syntax is needed.

True. But isn't the point of this shortcut notation that it saves you 
the trouble of specifying those directions and voice names on your own? 
- Coincidentally, that's why I hardly ever use it: I tend to get lost 
with the automatic assignment and prefer more (manual) verbosity here, 
but I'm mostly setting vocal music where I need to assign lyrics and 
stuff later.


Cheers,
Alexander