Dashed staff lines in LilyPond

[Paul Morris]

Hi all, 

Dashed staff lines are now possible in LilyPond with the help of some Scheme code.  A solution for getting "zig-zag" style staff lines was posted to the LilyPond user list, and I was able to edit it to achieve dashed staff lines. Previously this was an obvious "missing feature" that a number of alternative notation systems needed. 

Here's the post with the code on the LilyPond user list, and an illustration is attached.

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2012-12/msg00733.html

I've made a note of this on the MNP's LilyPond wiki page:

http://musicnotation.org/wiki/LilyPond#Customizing_Staff_Lines

With the time and effort to carry it out, we can use code like this to create template files for using various alternative notation systems with LilyPond.  (Basically moving forward with the work that Kevin Dalley began back in 2007.)

Cheers,

-Paul

[Paul Morris]

On May 15, 2013, at 9:16 PM, Érico Schmitt <ericos...@gmail.com> wrote:

What about dashed ledger lines? i want to use a staff that looks like those in the exemple, but other note spacing (MUTO / thumline)

Which example do you mean?

When some ledger line out of the staff is required, that corresponds to the dashed one in the middle (octave of that note) then that ledger line would be dashed and fill the whole bar.
Is that somehow possible?

It can be done manually by starting and stopping a different staff override for the measures that included the additional lines.[1]  I think it would be difficult to write code to do it automatically when needed.  I wouldn't say it's definitely "impossible," since LilyPond is so flexible, there might be a way.

[1]  I use this technique to extend the staff for a few measures in Maple Leaf Rag in TwinNote:

http://twinnote.org/sheet-music/#joplin-maple

-Paul M