Re: Dynamic mark at the end of a bar

[David Nalesnik]

Hi David,

On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 10:47 AM, David Sumbler <address@hidden> wrote:

Thanks to all for your consideration of the problem I have been having
in placing a dynamic at the end of a bar.

Stephen's 2 solutions are quite effective in some cases, but so far as I
can see cannot be made to work when there is a single note (e.g. a
semibreve) which has to carry the hairpin.

The solution using \afterGrace is not dissimilar (or so it seems to me)
to David's original suggestion of using a parallel music _expression_ with
spacer rests to position the final dynamic.

The trouble is, that these are all in one sense work-arounds, and might
give problems where the music in question is to be used in both a score
and parts.  Of course, this difficulty can easily be got around by using
tags to create 2 different versions, one for the score and one for the
part.

Why do I refer to all of these as work-arounds?  It is because none of
them actually directly achieves what we want.  Whether it is my dynamic
at the end of a bar (which some people seem to consider unorthodox,
though I disagree) or a pair of grace-notes after a trill, we know where
the item should appear: it is just before the barline (or the following
note, if it is not at the end of a bar).  All the work-arounds fake this
by placing the object in relation to a note or rest which occurs near
the end of the bar, and then if necessary adjusting the horizontal
offset.  And, so far as I can see, we cam only find the correct values
by trial and error.  Even then we might have to change them because of
later editing.

There is absolutely nothing at all wrong with this.  But it would be
nice if we could just place the object where we actually want it, i.e.
in relation to the bar-line, and know that that is where it is going to
appear no matter what might happen with the spacing of the bar during
editing or compilation.

The approach I suggested is of course faking what you want, .  Dynamics are attached to notes, spacers by LilyPond's convention, so I introduce a combination of spacers to allow me to attach a dynamic to a spacer which will get the dynamic in the right spot.  Given LilyPond's spacing routines, this placement will probably require tweaking.

The only alternative to placing the dynamic using spacers and SimultaneousMusic I see would be to create an alternate routine for typesetting such a combination.  In the case of a hairpin with dynamic on a single, untied note, both would be attached to the note (rather than one to s1*0 as you do above--which could suggest a multi-strand approach), but the hairpin's length and the dynamic's X-offset from its parent would be calculated in relation to each other.

David