Ties across staves

[Andrew Bernard]

Greetings All,

I apologise that this is a seemingly endlessly recurring question, but I want to find out the current state of play with regard to being able to do ties across voices in different staves. Refer to the attached example for a figure that I need to set literally dozens and dozens  of. There’s a group of grace notes that are tied to chord notes in the bottom staff and the top staff as well. Musically this seems perfectly reasonable. Lilypond does not want it. To make this score I have to fake it out by using laissez vibrer ties for the grace note ties in the upper staff (or the reverse, depending). Then I have to adjust the length of the laissez vibrer ties individually with a custom scheme function. It’s tedious, error prone, and the final result is suboptimal.

Is there a solution to this scenario, or a better way of handling it?

Doing a deep search of the archives, I came across a telling comment from David Kastrup some considerable time ago saying that he felt this situation reflected a fiundamental inadequacy of lilypond in this area that ought to be addressed (not verbatim, but this was the gist of the comment, I believe). Has it turned out to be impossible due to the internal architecture of lilypond? Can you ever have one voice across different staves? This question keeps recurring in the mailing list. What answers do we have as of 2016?

Any help most appreciated.

Andrew

ties-across-staves.png
Description: PNG image