Thank you for the clarification, Jean! If I now use denominators <= 9, the
output works (from 10 no longer).
I think a function \ratio could be helpful to improve the accuracy of the
output a little bit more, Vaughan.
Thanks for the help so far!
Best regards,
Adrian
On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 2:10 AM Vaughan McAlley <vaug...@mcalley.net.au>
wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 19 Oct 2023, 03:49 Jean Abou Samra, <j...@abou-samra.fr> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Here is a more minimal example illustrating your problem:
>>
>> \version "2.24.2"
>>
>> {
>> \scaleDurations 1/2 c'1
>> \scaleDurations 1/3 d'1
>> \scaleDurations 1/5 e'1
>> \scaleDurations 1/7 f'1
>> \scaleDurations 1/11 g'1
>> \scaleDurations 1/13 a'1
>> \scaleDurations 1/17 b'1
>> \scaleDurations 1/19 c''1
>> \scaleDurations 1/23 d''1
>> \scaleDurations 1/29 e''1
>> \scaleDurations 1/31 f''1
>> \scaleDurations 1/37 g''1
>> }
>>
>> The underlying issue here is that you use lots of "complicated"
>> multipliers, with high denominators. LilyPond needs to represent each point
>> in time in an exact way, which it does using fractions. However, because
>> the denominators you use are sufficiently large and have sufficiently few
>> common prime factors, the denominator of the fraction needed to represent a
>> moment in your score gets huge. In my example above, the product of primes
>> up to 37 has the order of magnitude of ten thousand billions, or two at the
>> power 43. Programs often use a fixed number of digits to represent
>> integers, for efficiency reasons. At some point, the computations overflow
>> the number of digits that is being used, and everything goes wrong.
>>
>> You might call it a bug, but I'd rather speak of a limitation. All
>> programs that are written in languages such as C++ (internally used in
>> LilyPond) exhibit overflow issues when you feed them with such huge
>> integers.
>>
>> So, unfortunately, I don't have a workaround to suggest other than to use
>> fractions with smaller denominators.
>>
>> Jean
>>
> Would a function that turns a fraction into whatever number/1000000 work?
>
> \scaleDurations \ratio 1/29 % or 1 29
>
> Cheers,
> Vaughan
>
>
>
