Re: Alternating text and music

[David Wright]

> Le 25 juil. 2019 à 16:45, Peter Toye <address@hidden> a écrit :
> Alternating text and music I want to engrave a piano piece, and have lines of 
> text between the staff groups. I know I can do this with several \score 
> blocks, but unfortunately there are a lot of tied notes at the ends of some 
> of the lines, which need to be engraved, at both the end and the start of 
> each line.
> 
> Is there any easy way of doing this? I'm not very good at the \markup command 
> :(

On Thu 25 Jul 2019 at 19:14:40 (+0100), Peter Toye wrote:
> Something like this but with the tie between the staves.

The easiest way I know, and which gives you total control, is to:
set your single \score with one system per page, ie line ≡ page,
burst¹ the PDF into separate PDF pages, your raw material,
crop² them so that they're not encumbered with white margins,
and assemble³ the cropped PDFs and text into the pages/book.

¹ $ pdftk filename.pdf burst
² $ pdfcrop --margins 1 input.pdf cropped.pdf
³ $ pdflatex (or lualatex) text-fragments-and-includegraphics-directives.tex

It's basically what lilypond-book does, but lets LP divide the score
into systems itself. You might need to set breakbefore to clear any
titling from the first line of music, and of course you don't want
LP's own pagenumbering.

Problems: your final .tex file will need to be kept in sync if
you make changes in the score that alters the linebreaking. This
can be ameliorated if you're using \break directives in the score.

Other methods:

Problem with markup: your text is tied to musical elements rather
than the pages you're building.

Problem with laissezVibrer/repeatTie: you have to slice and dice
the music yourself, and that interferes with other elements of
the scores like dynamics, octavation, etc.

Cheers,
David.