bar-line problems

[David Biddiscombe]

I'm sorry the following is rather lengthy; I've tried to be as concise
as possible.


• My music-reading friends and I find that in lilypond version 2.12.2,
bar lines of the default thickness are unpleasantly heavy and obtrusive
(especially double bar lines, which have virtually no white space
between the two lines). An earlier version (2.4.6, I think) produced far
cleaner-looking lines. In an attempt to get better bar lines I tried
including the command

\override Staff.Barline #'hair-thickness = #n

with various values of n. But even with n = 0 the lines seemed slightly
thicker than the 2.4.6 **default** ones, and the double bar lines
produced by \bar “|:” , \bar “||” , \bar “:|” , \bar “.|” etc. still had
hardly any white space between them. Moreover, in a song with lyrics
between the treble and bass clefs, every bar line had an unwanted dot
attached to it at the level of the lyrics baseline (using GrandStaff—
because PianoStaff put the lyrics below the bass staff). These dots
looked like full stops in the lyrics. Was the above override command
formulated correctly, or is there any other way I can overcome these
faults?


I emailed the lilypond-user address with some requests for help and
mentioned this problem too: Daniel Hulme thought the fault might be only
in the PDF image, but it's in the printout too; Marc Hohl wrote that it
was a known bug of evince, not lilypond; and Kieran MacMillan thought
the unwanted dots were due to the SpanBar being still at full thickness.
I don't fully understand these comments; I'll be very grateful for your
advice.


• I think (on the basis of the window produced by Insert > Special
Character . . .) that the command \char #2014 in an input file should
produce a long dash. However, it produces a different character. Is this
a bug?--with an earlier lilypond version \char #169 similarly failed to
produce the copyright symbol but now behaves as expected.



David.




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[Neil Puttock]

2009/11/2 David Biddiscombe <david@...>:

> I emailed the lilypond-user address with some requests for help and
> mentioned this problem too: Daniel Hulme thought the fault might be only
> in the PDF image, but it's in the printout too; Marc Hohl wrote that it
> was a known bug of evince, not lilypond;

It's most likely to be your PDF viewer, since the settings for
barlines haven't changed since 2.4.6.

If I view your PDF using evince, the barlines are still quite thick,
despite the 'hair-thickness override; furthermore, the printout is
also faulty.  On the other hand, using okular, both image and printout
have very faint barlines (and the default appearance with BarLine
overrides removed is fine).

> and Kieran MacMillan thought
> the unwanted dots were due to the SpanBar being still at full thickness.

This is caused by the addition of the Bar_engraver to the Lyrics
context, so you need to make these barlines invisible (either by
overriding BarLine #'transparent = ##t or setting whichBar = #"").

> • I think (on the basis of the window produced by Insert > Special
> Character . . .) that the command \char #2014 in an input file should
> produce a long dash. However, it produces a different character. Is this
> a bug?--with an earlier lilypond version \char #169 similarly failed to
> produce the copyright symbol but now behaves as expected.

The number 2014 is in hexadecimal, so you either need to tell \char
that you're passing a hex value or convert it to decimal:

\char ##x2014

\char #8212

Regards,
Neil


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[David Kastrup]

Neil Puttock <n.puttock@...> writes:

> 2009/11/2 David Biddiscombe <david@...>:
>
>> I emailed the lilypond-user address with some requests for help and
>> mentioned this problem too: Daniel Hulme thought the fault might be only
>> in the PDF image, but it's in the printout too; Marc Hohl wrote that it
>> was a known bug of evince, not lilypond;
>
> It's most likely to be your PDF viewer, since the settings for
> barlines haven't changed since 2.4.6.
>
> If I view your PDF using evince, the barlines are still quite thick,
> despite the 'hair-thickness override; furthermore, the printout is
> also faulty.  On the other hand, using okular, both image and printout
> have very faint barlines (and the default appearance with BarLine
> overrides removed is fine).

That being said: if someone wants to investigate further and a
workaround can be found that causes the same result on correct systems
and does not trigger the problem on evince, that would be worth
including.

It has been my experience as a package maintainer that after the
hundredth time of putting the blame where it belongs, it gets tiresome.
Versions with this bug, even if it gets fixed immediately, will be
around for years, and dealing with the reports is a resource drain.

--
David Kastrup



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[Valentin Villenave]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 9:24 AM, David Kastrup <dak@...> wrote:
> That being said: if someone wants to investigate further and a
> workaround can be found that causes the same result on correct systems
> and does not trigger the problem on evince, that would be worth
> including.

It has been made clear in the past that evince is not our friend:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2007-11/msg00135.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2008-09/msg00852.html


> It has been my experience as a package maintainer that after the
> hundredth time of putting the blame where it belongs, it gets tiresome.
> Versions with this bug, even if it gets fixed immediately, will be
> around for years, and dealing with the reports is a resource drain.

Ditto, that's already been discussed -- and dismissed by Han-Wen:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2007-07/msg00075.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2007-07/msg00506.html

(Which led our late developer Rune to tell me once: "The first rule of
LilyPond is: Han-Wen always wins :-)" )

Cheers,
Valentin


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