Re: Unconventional score and unwanted stray staff lines

[Aaron Hill]

On 2019-05-18 10:46 pm, David Bellows wrote:
> > Maybe use bar checks?
> Given that a lot of the music isn't generated to fit any particular
> time signature (ie, the bar lines are often there just to break things
> up to ease reading), I would get tons of bar check errors. Plus,
> keeping track of when bars should be inserted in my software seems
> like it would be a huge chore. Is this something you think would solve
> the problem?
I would have thought it fairly trivial* to keep track of bar lines.  You 
need only add up the durations of the notes you have emitted and, when 
the running count equals a whole measure, you know there is spot for a 
bar check.  Of course, you might have notes that overlap the bar line, 
and perhaps you are leveraging LilyPond's ability to automatically split 
notes.  In this case, you would see that the durations exceed a whole 
measure by some fraction.  For the purposes of inserting bar checks, you 
would skip it since the next note does not start the measure.
(* Let's assume that 1/128 notes are the shortest duration your program 
generates.  Then each instance of that duration could simply add one to 
a counter.  1/64 notes add two; 1/32 add four; etc.  Depending on how 
many 1/128 notes make up the desired length of a measure, you subtract 
that amount from the running total when it is equal or greater.  And 
anytime the counter is zero, you emit a bar check before the next note.  
Of course the amounts to add get a little more interesting with tuplets 
and unusually scaled durations.  A more general-purpose rational 
representation could be useful.)
I have not checked exactly, but perhaps your final measures on each line 
are not precisely aligned to a whole measure.  You can of course say 
\bar "|." early, but maybe you need to use \partial on the final measure 
as well.  Granted, this would require that your software cache notes 
before writing them so you can tell if you are going to have a short 
measure.
One thing to consider: if your music is really fluid, perhaps writing 
things with \cadenzaOn makes sense.  Here there are no measures, and you 
can emit bar lines whenever you see fit.  (In fact, you *have* to emit 
bar lines if you want the music to be able to break across a lines.)  
But I am unsure if this is strictly speaking necessary to get your setup 
working.
\stopStaff should be helpful to ensure that the StaffSymbol does not run 
past a point; but maybe you need to play around with break-alignment to 
resolve the issue of those pesky extra clefs showing up.  Then again, it 
is entirely possible that your intentionally misaligned systems are just 
running afoul of some limitation of LilyPond.  I certainly have never 
tried pushing this aspect of the software.

-- Aaron Hill