Re: Cross staff and beaming

[Nathan Ho]

On 2016-11-05 08:05, Andrew Bernard wrote:
> This is a question about cross staff stems and beaming. Referring to
> the attached example, can this be done by any means in lilypond? Am I
> missing something obvious?
>
> Is there perhaps any way to have beams from the bass and from the
> treble be made to coincide so as to get something like this, as a sort
> of fake out? Lilypond of course does its level best to avoid beams
> from the staves colliding. I am wondering if there is any way to
> override this behaviour, of course normally desirable, but here it
> would be useful.

Hi Andrew,

There's a hack for this that works very well, if I may say so myself. I 
don't think I ever posted it to the list and it's lost on an old hard 
drive, but it shouldn't be hard to recreate.

This is a kind of cross-staff stem, the twist being that the stems being 
joined have opposing directions. Copy-paste the Scheme code for 
cross-staff stems, which has a check to ensure that the two stems that 
you're joining 1) have the same direction and 2) have horizontal 
positions are within a certain margin of error of each other (I think it 
was 0.01 staff spaces). Remove the first check and widen the margin as 
necessary. All you need to do then is manually shift one of the note 
columns until the stems connect, and it Just Works.


Nathan