Re: Simultaneous marks

[Mats Bengtsson]

> I have lots of places in my score where I want two marks at the same place.
> In my case, it is a time (but it could be a normal rehearsal mark) and a 
> tempo indication.  Right now, I do this:
> 
> \mark #`(lines (italic "36:09")
>          (columns ((font-relative-size . -1) ,note) (italic " = 120")))
> 
> Where I snagged the metronome marking hack from the Lilypond documentation.
> 
> I have a lot of trouble with the font specification for the timing mark.
> If I put "roman" or "text" instead of "italic", I get fonts that seem, to
> me,  random.  I also get lots of "warning: can't find ascii character: 32"
> and messages like that.  Specifically, it doesn't like 32, 120, 61, 58 which
> are spaces, "=", and ":".  Also "x", but I have no idea why it is
> even looking for that character.  So, it kind of works, but I get
> lots of these warning messages and sometimes the font comes out weird
> (like the first mark will be roman, the next will be the time signature
> font, and I have even seen it come out using the basic feta font characters
> instead of roman).

By default, rehearsal marks are typeset using the "number" font
family, which gives a font that only contains digits. The only 
exception is if you specify the mark text as a string that contains
non-numeric characters. In my opinion, the implementation should
be changed to default to the standard "roman" font and only 
change to "number" if the argument is a purely numeric string.

Anyway, what you want to do is to specify "roman" to get 
a normal font, possibly followed by additional font 
specifications, i.e. you could say (roman "My mark") or
((roman italic) "My mark"). The example you give above
just happens to work, since Lilypond defaults to standard
roman font if it cannot find any matching font (the 
combination italic+number doesn't exist).


> Also, I would like to be able to box the timing mark without boxing
> the metronome mark.  I found the box hack in the Lilypond
> documentation, but it seems to box the whole composite mark, not just
> the part that I want boxed.  If I could get to different marks at the
> same time, I could change the mark properties in between them.  With
> this composite mark, though, I need to be able to box only part of it.
> Any hope of doing this?

This is a limitation in Lilypond. It should be possible to specify
"boxed" or "circled" in the text markup. However, see below.

> By the way, I like the metronome mark in the \mark command because I put
> them in a global part that is used everywhere, so it is hard to associate the
> metronome mark with a specific note in a specific part.

You're not limited to \mark even if you use a global part, 
it's possible to attach a text script to a spacing note:
s1^#`(columns ((font-relative-size . -1) ,note) ((roman italic) " =
120")). You may want to increase the padding to avoid collisions
with simultaneous notes:
\property Voice.TextScript \set #'padding = #2.0

   /Mats