Folks,
it has bothered me for some time now that if, at some individual point
in a piece, I'm not satisfied with LilyPond's beaming decisions, I have
to resort to specifying the full beams manually.
Example: If for some reason, the manuscript I'm copying has exceptional
beams of 4+2+2 instead of the usual 4+4 as in the second bar of
grafik
from Scarlatti's Partimenti (and I want to reproduce that beaming
faithfully), I have do to:
c8 c' b a e[ e'] cis'[ d']
So basically I have to enter redundant information: I have to tell
LilyPond to
1) start a beam on e,
2) end a beam on e',
3) start another beam on cis',
4) end that beam on d'.
Out of these, only 2) & 3) should be necessary, and actually, those
could be condensed further to
0) Split the autobeam between e' and cis'.
I implemented this, and a corresponding mechanism for joining
auto-beams, in a draft merge request to LilyPond proper:
https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/merge_requests/2668
With that addition, I can typeset the second bar above as:
c8 c' b a e e' \| cis' d'
Unfortunately this is not available for testing at the moment for people
who do not self-compile LilyPond.
Nevertheless, I'd like to ask for feedback from the community: Would
such a feature be welcome?
I, for one, have stumbled over this missing feature (that's basically
equivalent to MuseScore's "Beam start" and "Beam middle" features) so
often that I finally sat down and implemented it. But of course it's not
completely obvious that such an addition would actually be beneficial,
as it introduces new syntax elements (at the moment: \| for splitting
and \_ for joining auto-beams) for something that can, in effect, be
created by current LilyPond as-is.
Lukas
