Re: Discuss signature for new function \annotate (new version)

[Richard Shann]

On Mon, 2013-06-10 at 18:24 +0200, Urs Liska wrote:
> Hi Richard,
> 
> thanks for the feedback. I'd be happy to design the stuff in a way that 
> it can be used by Denemo and Frescobaldi as well.
> 
> Am 10.06.2013 17:53, schrieb Richard Shann:
> > This looks great Urs. I wrote a CriticalComment command for Denemo that
> > allows you to attach comments to notes in a score. These comments can
> > include \score {} blocks so that the music being commented on can be
> > engraved within the sentence.
> Well, _that's_ what I meant by 'further use cases'. I didn't think of 
> that even though I had missed that possibility in an earlier project :-(
> > The Critical Comments are collected up and
> > referenced at the end of the music.
> I will certainly have a look into what you already did. It probably is a 
> good idea to have parts of the logic in a) the input editor and b) 
> (optionally) some post-processing.
> (I want to have a Python script that processes my list of annotations to 
> various formats: maybe html pages, text/markdown, LaTeX. That way 
> compiling the score will result in (say) a html page or pdf document 
> with a todo list and musical questions, all linked to the input file 
> through textedit links.)
> > It will be nice to have more of this
> > work done by your /annotate command: especially troublesome is devising
> > a way of unambiguously creating the reference to the point in the score
> > in question (Denemo is making do with Movement, Staff and bar number) -
> What exactly do you mean by 'reference'? What I thought of was basically 
> letting the author enter an arbitrary string (that makes sense in the 
> context of his document).
> But you're probably right: If I have more than one score in the file it 
> won't be enough to just determine the bar number.
> What exactly would you suggest would be nice to reference from/to?

what you are calling a "score" here is what Denemo calls a "movement",
Denemo scans through the movements, staffs/voices and bars and creates a
reference M<n>, V<n>, B<n> which it prepends to the text of the comment.
The user can write by hand things like "third quarter note ..." and
perhaps that is the best that can be done to specify a particular point
in the bar (of course the point can be asterisked). What would be nicer
would be to reference the Instrument name I guess, but that is perhaps
not a suitable thing to be done at the LilyPond level.

> > the ability to mention the page number
> I don't for sure but I'm afraid this will be quite difficult. IISC when 
> LilyPond interprets \annotate it doesn't have any idea about layout yet.
> I didn't think of that since in critical reports you usually don't have 
> page numbers (only bar numbers) but it would surely be a good idea to have.

well, it would be icing on the cake - useful for very large scores, I
guess. That it is not commonly done probably is a reflection of the
difficulty in doing it.

> > and the whereabouts within the
> > bar would be very nice.
> Yes, I hope that will be possible.
> Any hints how to retrieve the position within a measure at the moment a 
> Scheme function is called?

I hope this question was aimed at listeners-in :) 
Seriously, people seem to choose context-specific ways to identify the
place in the critical commentaries I have seen. Having the ability to
quote the measure as music (or part of it) helps, of course. In Denemo
you select the bit of the measure and then click to install the snippet
as a LilyPond \score {} block in the markup. Getting this working
properly so that you can mention more than one bit of music in a single
comment was partly what prompted my question about line-width earlier.

Richard