[Denemo-devel] Score Layout View

[Richard Shann]

I have had a Good Idea.
The layout of staffs/lyrics/voices/page breaks between movements etc is
not so easy to visualize and control in Denemo. We have a command to
print the score and one to print a part and some more specialized ones
to print reduced scores etc. But hidden away (in the LilyPond view) is
all the mechanism needed to print any sort of score from the music data
that Denemo holds. (This is the custom score block facility, which
requires LilyPond knowledge to use).

What we could do is provide a Score Layout View. It would hold the
blocks of music data (the staffs, voices, lyric blocks etc) displayed as
widgets. The user could then drag these around as they wished, omitting
unwanted parts, inserting page breaks between movements, positioning
Lyrics above the staff, enclosing groups of staffs in the staff
groupings (Choir, Piano, Grand etc) and name the particular score layout
for future use. Denemo just has to create the LilyPond custom score
block corresponding to the layout the user has created - all the rest is
already done.

In this case commands like PrintPart would just create a layout view
containing only that part, and then use that to print.

The motivation for this idea was a request for a SATB choir with the
parts on two staffs, the four sets of lyrics distributed above and below
the two staffs. Denemo does not know how to handle lyrics on voices on
that share a staff - I am not sure what it would do, but it couldn't be
pleasant!

The score layout view would provide a more obvious place to edit the
score titles etc and to set the indent and other aspects of the score,
since the blocks would be identified by these fields (unless they were
empty, in which the numbering would be used - movement 1, voice 2 etc).
The user seeing these names would naturally think to edit them directly
there - for example, editing all the titles of the movements in this one
window, rather than navigating through the movements and editing there.

Richard