LilyPond and Tripod Notation
Graham Breed
http://x31eq.com/magic/tripod-code.zip
It serves as examples of what you can do with LilyPond these
days. Some points of interest:
Sagittal is working cleanly now. You have to override the
X- and Y-extent of Accidental, but once you do that you can
load Sagittal by name instead of installing it as a fake
system font. I keep the X- and Y-extents in an alist along
with the strings.
There's nothing special about Sagittal that makes this work.
Any font that Pango supports will do as well. All you
have to do is go in and find the unicode codes and work out
the X- and Y-extents.
Three different tripod scores are produced from the same
notes. This is an example of what I count as conversion
between notation systems. You define the pitches and you
can tell Lilypond to interpret them differently for
different notations. It could go further. When you have
ambiguities in two different systems you can add pitch names
that resolve them. This is more parallel development than
automatic conversion, and I think a GUI could do it, but for
now you can do it in LilyPond.
The tricycle examples don't follow this model. They're
written in equal temperament with fingerings added
explicitly. I could write a script in my favorite language
to convert from tripod notation (or vice versa) but I'll
leave it for now. I expect there's a way to get fingerings
from pitches but I need to learn more about LilyPond to
implement that. Tricycle's strange contorted character
doesn't help but a similar problem would arise for AFMM
notation, which would also naturally work with "fingerings"
for cents.
I defined a command for switching between two different sets
of accidentals. I suggested this before but now you can see
that it really works.
The unequal lines of tripod notation work reasonably well.
LilyPond lets you draw them where you like. It also allows
other than 7 nominals per octave. This feature was
undocumented when I discovered it but works no problem.
Well, I don't know what happens with chord symbols or
tablature, but basic notation works. Transposition would
work if I could tell it to skip over the river.
The biggest problem is that ledger lines don't follow the
same pattern as the staff. That's why in "Crossing the
River" I make the staff bigger instead. It's not a big deal
because it won't take up much more space than the ledger
lines would, and I expect you can enlarge it temporarily if
you want to. This is more of a problem with Wilson's 12
note notations because there should be a space above and
below the staff. So that's an example of a notation that
still isn't supported.
I haven't got dashed lines working in LilyPond, so I left
them out. The printed scores look fine but I still think
you need the extra lines as a guide if you're writing by hand.
Graham