bar-line problems

[David Biddiscombe]

I'm sorry the following is rather lengthy; I've tried to be as concise
as possible.


• My music-reading friends and I find that in lilypond version 2.12.2,
bar lines of the default thickness are unpleasantly heavy and obtrusive
(especially double bar lines, which have virtually no white space
between the two lines). An earlier version (2.4.6, I think) produced far
cleaner-looking lines. In an attempt to get better bar lines I tried
including the command

\override Staff.Barline #'hair-thickness = #n

with various values of n. But even with n = 0 the lines seemed slightly
thicker than the 2.4.6 **default** ones, and the double bar lines
produced by \bar “|:” , \bar “||” , \bar “:|” , \bar “.|” etc. still had
hardly any white space between them. Moreover, in a song with lyrics
between the treble and bass clefs, every bar line had an unwanted dot
attached to it at the level of the lyrics baseline (using GrandStaff—
because PianoStaff put the lyrics below the bass staff). These dots
looked like full stops in the lyrics. Was the above override command
formulated correctly, or is there any other way I can overcome these
faults?


I emailed the lilypond-user address with some requests for help and
mentioned this problem too: Daniel Hulme thought the fault might be only
in the PDF image, but it's in the printout too; Marc Hohl wrote that it
was a known bug of evince, not lilypond; and Kieran MacMillan thought
the unwanted dots were due to the SpanBar being still at full thickness.
I don't fully understand these comments; I'll be very grateful for your
advice.


• I think (on the basis of the window produced by Insert > Special
Character . . .) that the command \char #2014 in an input file should
produce a long dash. However, it produces a different character. Is this
a bug?--with an earlier lilypond version \char #169 similarly failed to
produce the copyright symbol but now behaves as expected.



David.