Re: Mystery empty staves appear on score

[David Kastrup]

mclaren <address@hidden> writes:

> Thanks, it's useful to know that Lilypond doesn't have printable
> objects to represent time values shorter than 1/128 note, but that
> Lilypond nevertheless does insert them into scores and deal with them.
>
> This offers an example of the inadequacy of the Lilypond
> documentation. This kind of limitation in Lilypond's output really
> should be featured prominently somewhere in the basic info about
> entering note-values in the Lilypond Learning Guide. One sentence
> would do: "WARNING: Lilypond has no glyphs to represent note- or
> rest-values shorters than 1/128 note, but if they are entered they
> will alter the score and appear as beamed values."  Or something like
> that.
>
> The Lilypond documentation is poorly organized and extremely
> incomplete. For exmaple, I was only only able to find out about tie
> direction control by glancing at an unrelated list of tweaks. Tie
> direction control \tieUp and \tieDown should be featured prominently
> in the Lilypond Learning Manual in the section on ties.

The index tends to be helpful.

Like all of LilyPond, the documentation is put together and maintained
by volunteers.  Like all of LilyPond, the documentation has been
developed over the course of decades and reorganized several times, by a
host of writers and with sometimes mixed quality.  The overall
organization and consistency and focus is not the same than if it were
written from scratch for the current version by a single well-versed
writer.

This is not cast in stone, however, and everyone is welcome to rework
the material presented by the manuals.

With regard to tie direction controls, they rarely make musical sense on
their own rather than in the context of whole voices which _also_ switch
the tie direction.  When individual ties need to be flipped because of
visual rather than musical reasons, that indeed is the realm of optical
tweaks.  The Learning Manual does not really cover details that make
mostly sense in course of building up larger chunks of functionality
rather than expressing musical content.  You can find stuff like that in
the reference manual, and the reference manual is not intended to be
read in sequence.  However, it is intended to make things easy to find,
and if you have reasonable suggestions or even patches that improve its
capacity of doing so, you'll certainly find people willing to pick up
your suggestions or help you develop them to a stage where they are easy
to apply to LilyPond's documentation.

Even for large-scale contributors, however, it is sort-of important to
try maintaining reasonable relations and mutual respect with other
contributors.  The reason for that is that while a single person may
tackle more substantial reorganizations, maintaining a large bulk or
corpus of code or documentation like that of LilyPond is beyond the
capacity of a single person, so turning dozens of small-time
contributors off while gaining a single more prominent contributor might
be a bad deal.

So while you are apparently willing to invest a lot of energy into
improving the state and documentation of LilyPond, you still need to
reconsider your attitude if your contribution is supposed to end up a
net win to the project.

-- 
David Kastrup