Re: Bar lines

[Marc Hohl]

Am 06.03.2013 21:24, schrieb David Kastrup:
> Marc Hohl <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > I am a bit disappointed that the discussion about \bar ":|."
> > rises half a year after the patch went through the revision
> > process.
> If you think this is the first time, you have missed a few times.  The
> revision process does not incorporate user feedback that we have seen in
> between, and it is usually rather sloppy.  If I would complain every
> time a feature of mine did not get any review at all during the regular
> review phase, people would be even more annoyed at me than they already
> are.
Yeah, ok. Perhaps I was in some bad temper when I wrote that.

In my opinion, the bar line stuff was not logically structured before.
As Harm pointed out, it was a mixture of shorthands, WYSIWYG and
whatnot.

The new interface is a 1:1 representation of the output in terms
of glyphs. Period. I think this is an improvement.

But I think I get your point. Using ".|: some stuff here :|." is not 
intuitive.
"|: other stuff :|" is.

Another example: assume I want a certain part being ended with "||".
The next part is a repeat, so I have to use ".|:-||" for this. *Very*
counterintuitive and annoying.

But here you come to the point of engraving music vs. writing music.
The engraving process as such means nothing else than
"stencil two dots in the plate, scratch a thin line and a thick line
at the end of the next bar" – so writing \bar ":|." (apart from the dot
being a poor interpretation of a thick  bar line, _not_ for the end
of a phrase, at least for me) is /engraving/.

When I compose a piece of music, I don't think in terms of engraving,
but in structures. I have

part A
Segno
repeat part B three times: [ 1. and 2. ending foo (Fine) ] [ 3. ending bar ]
D'al Segno al Fine

and ideally, I have a 1:1 representation of the song structure in the
lilypond sources.
> > The basic idea behind the bar line interface based on Harm's
> > work, and I like the idea of having a 1:1 representation of the
> > bar line stringwise.
> For specifying the visual composition of a particular bar type: full
> agreement.  That makes excellent sense.  What does not make sense is to
> require the user to specify the visual composition of a bar every time
> he wants to use it.  That's WYSIWYG without style sheets.
>
> > But if anyone wants to implement aliases, go ahead.
> I was of the impression that this was undesired.
Perhaps I misunderstand you all the way, but isn't this what you want?
The user should be able to write "|:" and get his/her opening repeat sign.
I remember me voting against aliases, and I still think that providing a
more user-friendly mechanism for structuring music makes aliases
superfluous. But I am not the one who makes the decisions.
> > I'd rather see lilyponds input structure being optimized. The \repeat
> > construct doesnt allow for d'al segno, da capo and stuff like that.
> > As I mentioned elsewhere, I seldom use the repeat sign explicitely, I
> > try to get along with \repeat volta. Moreover, I find it very annoying
> > to end every piece with an explicit \bar "|." I'd like to see that
> > lilypond ends a piece with "|." by default – in the rare cases where I
> > need a different ending bar line, I would code \bar "|" or \bar "||"
> > or whatever.
> I am not sure this would not be even more annoying when doing music
> theory texts with lilypond-book.
No. We already have properties like

defaultBarType
doubleRepeatType
startRepeatType
endRepeatType

Why not add a lastBarType or finalBarType?
This is set to "|." per default and can be easily overwritten – locally 
or globally.

> > If lily would offer a better way to _structurize_ music, this
> > discussion would be rather academic.
> We'd still need a way to configure the visual appearance.
I am not sure what you mean here – with the properties mentioned above
I can switch to whatever style/appearance I can imagine *without* having
to fiddle with explicit \bar ... declarations if I have the possibility 
write down
the structure of the song.

This does not necessarily mean that the current mechanism should be
replaced by something else – if I have to engrave old music without the
need for proper midi file creation, I would use \bar ... constructs to
mimic the composer's manuscript as detailed as possible.

But as I can use \repeat volta 2 { ... } or \bar ".|:" ... \bar ":|." 
and get
(in most cases) identical output, I'd go one step further and enhance the
repeat technique to cover da capo, d'al segno and stuff like that.

In this way, I can use lilypond both for engraving and writing music.

Marc
>