Hi, Congratulations on all the improvements in 2.25 so far. The whole series of typographic changes (going back to 2.24) are a marvel; the shape, weighting and spacing of figured bass numerals are, in particular, so exacting as to be indistinguishable from the best printed examples I can think of. It took me a minute to understand what's now going on with font specification just being a property, but this makes so much sense and is such a better way of specifying fonts.
I chaffed for years under the limitation of not being able to combine niente hairpins with flared hairpins; it was never clear to me if I was overriding something incorrectly somewhere. Compiling with the 2.25.x releases fixed every example in my scores. I'm really grateful to whoever harmonized those two overrides. Likewise, the (perhaps obscure) PaperColumn.X-alignment-extent immediately increased the professionalism of the spacing of a few older scores. Spacing is so complicated, and the change really helps. Thank you. I had to set outside-staff-priority on a few horizontal brackets, but it was trivially easy to do, and the analysis brackets look the cleanest they have ever looked, in any version of LilyPond. And \pushContextProperty, \popContextProperty are such obviously smart generalizations. They're just such a clean idea, and such a welcome feature. Again, thanks to whoever figured them out and wrote what must have been a number of tests to make sure all the stack-management stuff worked right. I have a few copy edits for the notes in the changelog. These are all pretty trivial (please don't read anything here as negative, exactly in the opposite, in fact), but I thought I'd send them over before 2.26 gets released, in case we want descriptions of the features to read in perfectly idiomatic language. I felt like it was the least I could do to help celebrate the detail of the features themselves. Edits apply to this ... https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.25/Documentation/changes-big-page.html ... document. The first bunch fix actual grammatical errors. The second just make the copy flow a bit better. Each group is ordered top-to-bottom, from the top of the page. * * * *Actual errors:* #1 EXISTING: "Using the new printInitialRepeatBar property, it is possible to make a start repeat bar line automatically printed even at the beginning of the piece." SUGGESTED: "Using the new printInitialRepeatBar property, it is possible to print a start repeat bar line, automatically, at the beginning of the piece." #2 EXISTING: "... instead requiring to include “Bold” in the font-name string." SUGGESTED: "... instead requiring “Bold” to be included in the font-name string." #3 EXISTING: "The font-series property is now more flexible and allows to specify values such as ..." SUGGESTED: "The font-series property is now more flexible and allows the specification of values such as ..." #4 EXISTING: "The new font-stretch property allows selecting a condensed or expanded font." SUGGESTED: "The new font-stretch property allows the selection of a condensed or expanded font." #5 EXISTING: "... thus compensating the change in the normal use case." SUGGESTED: "... thus compensating for the change in the normal use case." #6 EXISTING: "... had too large glyph bounding boxes due to a bug in the font production chain." SUGGESTED: "... had overly large glyph bounding boxes due to a bug in the font production chain." #7 EXISTING: "For orthogonality with other ancient clefs, five new mensural clefs are available ..." SUGGESTED: "For consistency with other ancient clefs, five new mensural clefs are available ..." COMMENT: "Orthogonal[ity]" doesn't work this way in English. In English, two things are orthogonal if they don't really have much (or anything) to do with each other. (YMMV in other languages.) #8 EXISTING: "Adjustments of this property must probably be updated." SUGGESTED: "Adjustments of this property probably must be updated." #9 EXISTING: "... it was actually available since version ..." SUGGESTED: "... it has actually been available since version ..." COMMENT: "ist seit, war seit" is always English present perfect #10 EXISTING: "... we now recommend to use the paper variables ..." SUGGESTED: "... we now recommend using the paper variables ..." #11 EXISTING: "Function ly:font-config-display-fonts got an optional argument to select the output port." SUGGESTED: "The function ly:font-config-display-fonts now provides an optional argument for output port selection." #12 EXISTING: "The Scheme command-line option handling is now more robust." SUGGESTED: "Scheme command-line option handling is now more robust." #13 EXISTING: "In course of the new implementation ..." SUGGESTED: "In the course of the new implementation ..." #14 EXISTING: "The side-position-interface got two new properties ..." SUGGESTED: "The side-position-interface now offers two properties ..." * * * *Suggestions for better flow:* #15 EXISTING: "Note that, as before, the widest clef in a staff group determines the horizontal position of all clefs in a system; this means, for example, that a piano score containing a treble and an alto clef doesn’t change at all." SUGGESTED: "Note that, as before, the widest clef in a staff group determines the horizontal position of all clefs in a system; this means, for example, that a system of music containing a treble and an alto clef doesn’t change at all." COMMENT: Just to avoid the flicker of doubt that happens when thinking about an alto clef in piano writing. #16 EXISTING: "As a result, this will break some existing Emacs configurations for the end users." SUGGESTED: "As a result, this will break some existing Emacs configurations for end users." #17 EXISTING: "As before, it is still strongly recommended to compile the .scm files into bytecode by first running make bytecode during compilation and then make install-bytecode in addition to make install." SUGGESTED: "As before, compiling the .scm files into bytecode is still strongly recommended: run make bytecode during compilation; then run make install-bytecode before make install." #18 EXISTING: "Using beam::slashed-stencil arbitrary beams may be slashed. Setting details.slash-side to RIGHT the slash is printed at right side of the beam." SUGGESTED: "Use beam::slashed-stencil to slash arbitrary beams. Set details.slash-side to RIGHT to print the slash at the right side of the beam." #19 EXISTING: "The appearence of the slash may be customized by overrides of the details subproperties over-beam-height, slash-slope, slash-side, slash-stem-fraction, slash-thickness, and slash-X-positions." SUGGESTED: "Use the over-beam-height, slash-slope, slash-side, slash-stem-fraction, slash-thickness and slash-X-positions subproperties to customize the appearance of the slash." #20 EXISTING: "The new option span-all-note-heads may be used ..." SUGGESTED: "The new span-all-note-heads option may be used ..." #21 EXISTING: "3 new properties have been introduced to tune automatic beam subdivision ..." SUGGESTED: "Three new properties have been introduced to tune automatic beam subdivision ..." #22 EXISTING: "Hairpins in the style of Ferneyhough now support al niente circles." SUGGESTED: "Hairpins in the style of Ferneyhough now support *al niente* circles." COMMENT: Italicize *al niente*. #23 EXISTING: "This may affect line breaking, horizontal spacing, and VoltaBracket extent ..." SUGGESTED: "This may affect line breaking, horizontal spacing, and VoltaBracket length ..." COMMENT: To concord with consensus on list that volta bracket has (minimum) length. #24 EXISTING: "White mensural ligatures now support some rare ligatures (semibreves alone or in the middle), and allow tweaks ..." SUGGESTED: "White mensural ligatures now support some rare ligatures (semibreves alone or in the middle), and accept overrides ..." COMMENT: The example uses \override (instead of \tweak) so maybe better to distinguish between the two in the accompanying explanation #25 EXISTING: "While still working for backward compatibility ..." SUGGESTED: "While still distributed for backward compatibility ..." #26 EXISTING: "Command \autoBeamOff now stops auto-beaming immediately." SUGGESTED: "The command \autoBeamOff now stops auto-beaming immediately." * * * I'll take it as a 2025 resolution to learn how to make a proper merge request. Trevor. -- Trevor Bača www.trevorbaca.com soundcloud.com/trevorbaca
