[Denemo-devel] Denemo's barlines

[Richard Shann]

Denemo's barlines have long been problematic. It used to be that Denemo
issued a request to LilyPond to check that the barline position that
Denemo had corresponded with what LilyPond calculated. I commented these
out because the warnings were unhelpful in the case of upbeats etc,
obscuring the real problems.
It occurs to me that we could ask LilyPond to stop auto-placing barlines
and issue the command to LilyPond to insert a barline wherever Denemo
has one.
There is a balance between creating readable LilyPond - the sort of
LilyPond someone might type in - and making an easily controllable GUI.
The case of repeat blocks is a good example of this: a LilyPond user
will want to see \volta 2 {  ...  } \alternative {{...}{...}} for a
repeat with first and second time bars, but from the perspective of the
user who never looks at the LilyPond the \set Score.repeatCommands =
#'((volta "1")) generated by the OpenFirstTimeBar command is simpler to
manage.
Likewise with this change - each bar will end with 

\bar "|"

which is more verbose than the simple barline check | which a user would
type.

Furthermore I am not sure quite how this will work out for those doing
more than trivial tasks. I'll implement it as an optional behavior and
we can take it from there. When ON Denemo will no longer use light gray
barlines, though it should perhaps continue to issue colored ones. In
this connection it seems to me that the visual impact of
incomplete/over-full measures has never been enough, considering the
havoc it can give in the output. Any suggestions for improvements
welcome.

Richard