> One question of all this to me is: how much of the output should
> (or can) be automatically positioned and how many 'hints' has
> one to include into the mudela definition. From my naive viewpoint
> at this time (not knowing much about lilypond), it is best to
> enter only 'musically relevant' information into the mudela file
> and as few typographical hints (or hacks) as possible.
That's more or less the strategy that has been chosen in the
design of Lilypond.
> Now, let's start with the remarks:
>
> 1. It seems to be difficult to enter dynamical indications in word
> form (like 'dim.', 'dimin.', 'sempre pi\'u p'). If I use e.g.
> a8-"dimin." g f
> there is much space around a and g, and 'dimin.' gets written in
> roman. Should these be written as a lyrics staff? Is there a
> nice font for these wordings? The same problem applies to
> wordings above the staff like 'poco ritard.' or 'in tempo',
> or 'pizz.', 'arco'.
Set the property textEmptyDimension = 1 to get rid of the extra
spacing and the property textStyle = "italic" to get a slanted
font for the text.
> 4. Can the note on the middle line be defaulted to have a stem
> going down instead of up? This may influence the direction of the
> stems of a group of beamed notes, too. They go up a little bit too
> often for my taste (and comparing to published printed works).
It would be very easy to add a property to make this customizable.
> 5. In bar timings < 4/4, 2/2, as e.g. 2/4, a rest r1 should have
> a length of the bar. Or is it possible to have whole rests
> (hanging on the 4th line from the botton of the staff) in such bars?
Try typing e.g. R2 instead of r2 . The capital R indicates a multi-
bar rest which is typeset in exactly this way.
> 6. Is it possible to have two large piano (in my case: harmonium)
> staff with smaller string staves above them?
You can mix any combination of single staffs, PianoStaffs and
StaffGroups in a score. Take a look at input/test/orcestscore.ly.
You could also set the staff size separately for each staff,
see input/test/staff-size.ly.
Unfortunately, several of Lilypond's features are not well
documented. However, you can find examples of most things
in the files in input/test/.
> 9. When I tie a note with accidential to a note in the next bar,
> can I avoid displaying the accidential there again? This is
> common practice.
This used to happen automatically, you found a bug.
> 12. Multi-voicing. In the harmonium part, I tried to enter
> some notes using two voices. I don't know if I understand
> how to correctly using voices: I use a context with a voice
> where I didn't give a ydirection value (hx and lx). Then, when
> I want to determine the direction of the stem, I nest another
> voice (ha and la, hb and lb). These two voices however seem to
> 'forget' sometimes the ydirection property! Especially in the
> low staff, I had to respecify this property often. Am I doing
> something wrong?
The current semantics of contexts is a bit complicated. I'll have
to take a closer look at your attached file before I can answer.
> Now, here is my first try, the Dvorak Bagatelle (warning--ugly!
> [not the music, beware, but the code!]). It should be old
> enough to be copyright free, I hope.
Yes, Dvorak himself is ``free'' (dead since more than 75 years),
however, the edition could still be protected. There was a
long discussion recently on this topic in this mailing list,
see the archive.
/Mats
