Re: Barbershop Quartet / TTBB template ready for your critique

[Arvid Grøtting]

"Peter B. Steiger" <address@hidden> writes:

> Singers, please take a look at it and tell me where it needs
> improvement.  Arvid, you mentioned working on a TTBB template; I would
> especially like to see yours (meaning: steal all your good ideas to put
> in mine).

I'm afraid it's at home and I'm at work at the moment; I'll try to
remember posting it, but please remind me if I seem to have forgotten,
OK?

I don't have 2.3 installed, but as far as I remember you'll get a
problem with using spaces where there's no music: lines of music with
no separate lyrics on them will still have space allocated for those
lyrics.[1]  "\skip"s will work, but I'm not sure how practical they are
when using \lyricsto.

In the (not unusual) case of rather few "exeptional lyrics"[2], I've
had luck doing things without \lyricsto, marking the rythm in the
lyrics like this (2.2-style):

   tiwords = \lyrics {
       \skip4*5 It's4 real -- ly fine!1
   }

Quite frankly, if the exeptional lyrics are too many for this to be
practical, the music probably belongs on one staff per voice with
all the lyrics for a voice underneath its staff.  (The music must be
rather simple and the exeptions few for 4-voice vocal music to be
readable from 2 staves, in my humble opinion as a tenor (and tenors
have it easy!))

I have some examples, some better than others, on
<http://regina.uio.no/~arvidg/noter.html>, unfortunately without
source at the moment, but I'll try and remember to put the source out
there too.  Anyway, <http://regina.uio.no/~arvidg/reger-abschied.pdf>
shows the spacing problem I mentioned (that is, how the vertical
spacing goes wrong when using spaces instead of skips, but it's
typeset with an old version, too, so that may be a contributing
factor).  <http://regina.uio.no/~arvidg/dunkom.pdf> shows the same
problem solved with \skip.


[1] I could be wrong, but this has been a problem in the past for me
with versions from at least 1.6 to 2.2.
[2] OK, so I invented that term right now.  You'll probably know what
I mean.
-- 

Arvid