Hi Shevek, > I often run into situations where two parts share a staff some > of the time and have individual staffs the rest of the time.
This is quite common. (I have scores where up to 8 different parts will share between 1 and 8 staves, depending on the situation.) > The way I handle it is like this [...] > I thought this might just be of interest to others who deal with a similar > scenario. That's very interesting! Right now I'm putting together a comparative analysis of the different methods of coding shared/split staves; this is not one I had previously seen or considered. As it relies on the partcombiner — which is both feature-poor and limited to two voices — it has some drawbacks; but there are also some benefits to the approach. Thanks for sharing it! > Are you using a similar technique, or do you have a better approach? "Better" is a matter of opinion… I know of three other primary ways of approaching it — each has its pros and cons. > Second, this strategy leads to the necessity of manually writing \set > Staff.shortInstrumentName = "1" whenever the second staff is visible, and > back again to \column { "1" "2" } whenever the second staff is hidden. Since > that depends on system breaking, which changes as I compose, getting the > correct labels in the left margin is a continual source of tedious manual > bugfixing. 1. Other mechanisms would allow you to set the instrument name once and never adjust it. (But the tradeoffs might not be worth that modest gain.) 2. Speaking from a depth of experience, I might recommend not worrying about margin labels while composing… I find the mode-switching keeps me from harnessing really good composition focus/flow. > What I'd really like is to be able to write some function or engraver that […] Well, that is a separate — and very compelling — kettle of fish. For quite some time, I've been thinking about (and asking/posting about, and offering to sponsor, etc.) a staff-labelling engraver which would determine the name of the performer(s) who were represented by that staff, using the partcombiner or not. > How feasible would such a project be? I don't see why it couldn't be done fairly easily using a Scheme engraver. > If it is feasible, how could I begin to approach it? That's a different story… My Scheme-fu is weak (though I'm working my way through some of the learning curve right now). Hopefully someone else can help. Cheers, Kieren. ________________________________ Kieren MacMillan, composer ‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info ‣ email: i...@kierenmacmillan.info _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user