James Harkins <jamshar...@gmail.com> writes: > On Aug 5, 2013 2:59 PM, "James Harkins" <jamshar...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I appreciate the thought, but I'm not quite interested in that > particular flavor of Kool-aid. I'll go with my eye on this. I don't > like how it looks, and I get something that is easier to read by > fussing with the line breaks. I'm satisfied with that -- the attached > *does* look perfect to me.
Looks good to me too. If I was going to quibble I would say the over-all horizontal spacing might be a bit tight - but maybe the whole score looks good just as it is, and having a tight spot here is worth it. Maybe drifting off topic... I just skimmed through a thick volume of the vocal works with piano by R. Strauss (mostly from Universal Edition and other good German-speaking publishers of that time). I didn't find any tied-note examples that would help - but what I did find was impressively wide spacing during the voice part, and a big easy-to-read text font. In some of the songs, the piano introductions or interludes have very compressed horizontal spacing, but as soon as the voice enters, BOOM! luxuriously wide spacing. That has to help with issues like this. (Also you're clearly correct that this "anticipatory-tie" situation just doesn't happen that often in older music.) These scores "look right" overall, with perhaps an impression of "let's waste some paper and make it perfect". :) Baerenreiter's (or Schott's?) early-80's setting of Schubert songs - tight musical spacing with a small thin-ish text font. Looks very good but the text might get hard to read if the singer's eyes aren't in good shape. Again, the overall look is consistent with itself, even though it's quite different from the above. Instead of sacrificing paper (as above), they sacrificed some text readability. Peters's well-known old print of the songs of Schumann (and their Schubert scores look about the same) (no date given, but the editor died in the 1930s) - the music is fairly tightly spaced, and the lyric font is dark and perhaps compressed horizontally. Very easy to read IMO, but maybe I'm just used to that style. This one looks right/consistent to me as well. In particular, the lyrics are easy to read, while visually harmonizing with the music - the blackness of the text and the blackness of the notes are subjectively about even, making it easier to shift my glance from one to the other without needing to re-focus. (- I think. I'm not an optometrist.) The sacrifice here is that the whole thing can turn out too tight, crammed onto the page. I guess if I was printing a very large collection of short songs I might settle for cramped spacing as well. BUT (for example) if I were to take the big, wide-open text font from the Strauss score and use it in the 1980s Schubert score, I suspect the words wouldn't even fit in the lines. Each publisher found an effective working setup that looks good, but they each solved the problems in different ways. What I take from looking at these scores is that to set primarily-vocal music really well, it's necessary to spend time before you start, making sure that your text font, your over-all horizontal spacing, and your notation font all work together to automatically give a good-looking result most of the time; and remembering that if you change any one of those you'll likely have to change the others to match it. It seems to me that Lilypond's beginnings were based purely on instrumental music, that Lilypond's lyrics were (and are) sort of an uncomfortable add-on with very limited flexibility (compared to how musically-flexible Lilypond is), and that the kind of extensive thought and experimentation with challenging vocal scores that the old publishers obviously put into their choices has not been done yet with Lilypond; so finding workable proportions to accommodate text, notes, and horizontal spacing is to some extent left up to each user. I think Lilypond's default text font is a very reasonable choice from a (free-) software point of view but only a fair-to-OK choice from a lyrics point of view. This is probably because fonts that are excellent from a lyrics point of view are non-free or hard-to-find or both. (In general, in my experience, lyric fonts for classical music are very traditional-looking according to late 19th-century expectations, able to be tightly spaced, perhaps horizontally somewhat compressed, and - very importantly - use lots of ink. The "jazz-style" fonts with their thick lines are certainly better for any lyric than spidery elegant light-coloured fonts would be.) If it was possible to compress and blacken Knuth's "Computer Modern" but keep it looking good, that would be on the right track at least. (That font seems to be in the right general style category, but it's much too light and airy for lyrics. The small-size variants of Computer Modern are blacker, but they're also wider and spaced looser, and that's the opposite of what seems to be needed here.) And copying the text:notation:spacing proportions of the old Peters edition vocal scores would go a long way as well. In those books, the font sizes and music sizes and spacing all work together very well, and they achieved pretty tight spacing while still mostly looking good. I just realized that what I probably want for a lyrics font is "The stereotypical dynamics font, but not italic". No surprise there, I suppose. -- David R _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
