Mats Bengtsson <mats.bengtsson <at> ee.kth.se> writes: > This is why many people try to use \partcombine for choral scores. > However, as you can see from the mailing list archives, there are > some problems with the current implementation of \partcombine.
Indeed there are. Partcombine may be useful for hymns -- I wouldn't know -- but in choral music notated on two staves, you usually want \lyricsto to work for all voices and in most cases you want two stems even when the voices sing the same note. A part combiner that can be told only to combine rests could be useful, but the warning message tells me this could probably be handled at the staff level. Note that I'm not saying that the Lilypond way of doing this is wrong; it looks good enough to me, and I've had no complaints that I can think of. It does go against all typographical convention, though. (Long ago, I used to do e.g. "r8 e e e r e16 e e8 e" in one voice and "s8 c c c s c16 c c8 c" in another, and Lilypond would center the lone rest. That worked fine unless I wanted to typeset both a two-staff and a four-staff version. I'm not complaining that it stopped working, either; it's more logical now. I know I can say "\oneVoice r8 \voiceOne e e e \oneVoice r \voiceOne e16 e e8 e"; that's rather more tedious and still doesn't solve the two-version problem. Plus, I want my \voiceOne and similar declarations in my score block, not in the music itself. And I know that I can say "x=\voiceOne y=\voiceTwo z=\oneVoice" and "\z r8 \x e e e \z r \x e" etc, and redefine x, y and z to no-ops if I want a four-staff score, but I'd still be doing a job that a computer program could do better...) Anyway. The warning message is wrong in the case of rests. I wouldn't mind an option to make what it says become true (assuming that typographical conventions were followed), but right now it says a lot and does nothing. BTW, how much would it cost to sponsor a "rest combiner", if I can find the money? I'd be happy to write test cases that demonstrate what rests should be combined and what shouldn't... ;-) (The specification is very simple, really: When all voices in a staff (that \consists RestCombiner or whatever) have a simultaneous rest of equal length, the RestCombiner swallows those rests and typesets a vertically centered rest. "<< r4 \\ r4 >>" becomes "r4".) Cheers, -- Arvid _______________________________________________ bug-lilypond mailing list bug-lilypond@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-lilypond
