Info Catalog lilypond-learning: Size of objects lilypond-learning: Appearance of objects

lilypond-learning: Length and thickness of objects

 
 4.3.3 Length and thickness of objects
 -------------------------------------
 
 Distances and lengths in LilyPond are generally measured in
 staff-spaces, the distance between adjacent lines in the staff, (or
 occasionally half staff spaces) while most ‘thickness’ properties are
 measured in units of an internal property called ‘line-thickness.’ For
 example, by default, the lines of hairpins are given a thickness of 1
 unit of ‘line-thickness’, while the ‘thickness’ of a note stem is 1.3.
 Note, though, that some thickness properties are different; for example,
 the thickness of beams is controlled by the value of the
 ‘beam-thickness’ property, which is measured in staff-spaces.
 
    So how are lengths to be scaled in proportion to the font size?  This
 can be done with the help of a special function called ‘magstep’
 provided for exactly this purpose.  It takes one argument, the change in
 font size (#-2 in the example above) and returns a scaling factor
 suitable for reducing other objects in proportion.  It is used like
 this:
 
      \new Staff ="main" {
        \relative g' {
          r4 g8 g c4 c8 d |
          e4 r8
          <<
            { f8 c c }
            \new Staff \with {
              alignAboveContext = #"main"
              \omit Clef
              \omit TimeSignature
              fontSize = #-2
              % Reduce stem length and line spacing to match
              \override StaffSymbol.staff-space = #(magstep -2)
            }
            { f8 f c }
          >>
          r4 |
        }
      }
      [image src="" alt="[image of music]" text="image of music"]
 
 Since the length of stems and many other length-related properties are
 always calculated relative to the value of the ‘staff-space’ property
 these are automatically scaled down in length too.  Note that this
 affects only the vertical scale of the ossia – the horizontal scale is
 determined by the layout of the main music in order to remain
 synchronized with it, so it is not affected by any of these changes in
 size.  Of course, if the scale of all the main music were changed in
 this way then the horizontal spacing would be affected.  This is
 discussed later in the layout section.
 
    This, then, completes the creation of an ossia.  The sizes and
 lengths of all other objects may be modified in analogous ways.
 
    For small changes in scale, as in the example above, the thickness of
 the various drawn lines such as bar lines, beams, hairpins, slurs, etc
 does not usually require global adjustment.  If the thickness of any
 particular layout object needs to be adjusted this can be best achieved
 by overriding its ‘thickness’ property.  An example of changing the
 thickness of slurs was shown above in Properties of layout
 objects.  The thickness of all drawn objects (i.e., those not produced
 from a font) may be changed in the same way.
 

Info Catalog lilypond-learning: Size of objects lilypond-learning: Appearance of objects