Re: Pedal cautionary after a line break (current status and improvements)

[Valentin Villenave]

On 6/25/20, Paolo Prete <paolopr976@gmail.com> wrote:
> The lack of a cautionary pedal on a bracket could be seen as an enhancement
> only in a self-referential context, which doesn't make sense to me. A
> proper way to proceed is to check what modern professional engravers do
> with it, and check as a consequence if Lilypond is coherent with them (->
> common practice)

Greetings Paolo,
determining whether this issue is a “Defect” or an “Enhancement” is
largely inconsequential; as Jean said (and we should be thankful to
him for opening a tracker page on your behalf, by the way), that does
not imply a different priority.

That being said, can you please document your claims? As a pianist
myself (and although I did specialize in contemporary music), I can’t
remember _any_ score where I’ve seen a pedal reminder after a system
break, off the top of my head. But that’s just me.

As you correctly point out, LilyPond’s aim of producing high-quality
music scores closely tracks what well-established engravers do;
obviously we’ve been mainly following 19th-century engraving practices
though, and pedal brackets have evolved a *lot* since then -- though
I’m not sure it could be argued that any “standard” pedal notation has
emerged in the past 70 years.

If you can provide us with (scanned) examples of several mainstream
editions that use these reminders, then indeed either Jean or I will
add these to the GitLab page, and relabel it as a Defect rather than
an Enhancement. As Jean said, this will be a crucial first step
towards implementing that feature (and, to begin with, acknowledging
that it is objectively something LilyPond needs).

Cheers,
-- V.