NoteWorthy Composer Forum

• Group: Whatever you want to keep your user tools organized
• Name: "Remove following rests of selection length"
• Command: Browse to location where you saved the downloaded file
• Input Type: File Text
• Options: Returns File Text

• Group: Whatever you want to keep your user tools organized
• Name: "Extend staff below with rests to cursor"
• Command: Browse to location where you saved the downloaded file
• Input Type: File Text
• Options: Returns File Text

local f = nwcut.loadFile()
for i = 1, #f.Staff do
  for j = 1, #f.Staff[i].Items do
    local item = f.Staff[i].Items[j]
    nwcut.warn(i ..'/'..j ..' --> '..(item:HasDuration() and 'true' or 'false')..'\n')
  end
end
nwcut.status = nwcut.const.rc_Report

1/1 --> true
1/2 --> true

item:HasDuration() and not item.Opts.Dur.Grace

• an example printout, which shows that some things look as they should (this is from a C.Ph.E.Bach organ sonata),
• the score,
• and the current code.

• There are two NWC staffs and, additionally, the "mirror drawing" above the second staff
• Staff 1 is the lower one you see - no problem here
• Staff 2 contains the notes to be mirrored.
  -- In the print version, it gets staff color white (you have to set "Highlight 4" to white  - I never needed it), and it gets layered over Staff 1; only the user objects get color black (you have to set "Highlight 5" to black). One could also set some things that can be scaled and moved up manually (e.g. texts, probably many user objects) to black and not mirror them.
  -- While editing, it is not layered and gets some visible color.
  

• Single - for a one-bar "simile sign" (centered in the bar) and/or a counting label
• Double - for a two-bar "simile sign" right over the bar line and/or also a counting label
• Double with 2 - for a two-bar "simile sign" with a 2 above it (a counting label is possible, but confusing in this case)

• "Plain" shows the repetition label unadorned;
• "Parentheses" shows it between (..);
• "Default" is "Plain" for the two "Double" types and "Parentheses" for type "Single".

• 0 - no label, sign is visible
• > 0 - both label and sign are visible
• < 0 - label shown (without the minus), but sign is invisible

• Single bar repeat marks demo
• Double bar repeat marks demo
• Single bar repeat marks on two staffs

• 2 - this is useful when one wants customary marks that start with label 2; the selection is from the first repetition onwards.
• -1 - this is useful when creating "B.B." style marks, i.e., where the initial segment gets label 1; the selection must include that initial segment.
• 0 - if one does not want any labels (e.g. if the repeat count is only 2 or 3); the selection is from the first repetition onwards.

• ...The main necessary feature is that the number 1 must appear above the notes defining the repeated segment.
  Why?  The tool doesn't seem to increment the number in the repeat bars and I don't think I've ever seen the number 1 appearing above the repeated bar in professionally engraved charts..
  Same for me, but the "bible" B.B. says differently; of course, I want only the option to do it according to Elaine Gould.
• Of course, one could create this label manually. However, to me this simply seems cumbersome - why not use the same object, but without a symbol? This seems quite logical to me.
  I'm not sure what you mean.
  If one wants that 1 above the first execution, one could put a standard text there (instead of the object providing that option); however, then centering would e.g. be not easy.
• The same effect (label, but no symbol because notes are visible) is necessary after a line break, according to one example in B.B.
  Yet in "Repeated bars and line break" you put the number in the visible bar that begins the second system.
  The label is the number (this is the "definition" in Mikes code). So yes, I put the label above the visible bar, as I say. I do not understand your "Yet" ... maybe you thought "label" was something else (see your question somewhere down below).
• First, I did not want to pop up two dialogs, therefore I put the flag that says whether the symbol should appear into the sign of the label; but maybe the alternative design, with a separate checkbox dialog with default "show symbol" does not need more key hits ... I have not counted them. 
  Agreed.  The fewer the clicks the better.  Getting to the label box in the dialogue window is a little awkward.
  As there is only one box, one ends up exactly there without any ado - that should be acceptable.
  
• Second, for single staff printing, the user tool should add useful spacers.
  As it currently works, you need spacers before and after the symbol to make it sit inside the bar instead of over the next bar line.  You want the double bar repeat to sit on the bar line, so it's only the single repeat that needs to be tweaked.
  No, also with double bar repeats spacers are necessary. The spacers are not for sitting inside the bar in the "Single" type - this is nicely done by a computation in Mike's code. The spacers are only necessary for single staff prints, in order to avoid that the bars collapse to length zero.[/green]
• How about changing the symbol from % to .....%..... (where ..... is a space set with the space bar), and using the Preserve Width setting?  The dialogue box could ask the user how many spaces to use..
  The "symbol" is drawn from separate lines, so it is not a text. The space rows, therefore would have to be two separate texts anyway - but then, spacers fulfill the same purpose and - I think - better, as series of spaces do not take part in the distance computations of NWC. Also, I think the space idea only works if one does not want the B.B. feature of having numbers over visible bars; but as I want to advertise NWC (at some point) as "doing all of B.B.", I would not like to do this.
• Last, the tool should make all the notes and dynamics (and what else??) invisible when applied.
  In percussion parts, jazz bass and jazz solo charts, the single bar repeat is dictating the rhythm or the chords  but not necessarily dynamics, text, dynamic variations, or tempo variations.  For instance, I occasionally see hairpins in the last few bars of single bar repeats.  In such cases, the repeat sign is not "correctly" a repeat, since you want the player to do what the rest of the group is doing.  I think it would be enough to simply change the notes within each bar to invisible, rather than make everything else invisible too.
  The user tool will (should) do what's standard; afterwards, one can manually change any visibility of any item at will. Te standard, according to B.B., is "notes and rests; and dynamics" - that's why I chose them. From your comment, I think that this is exactly what should be done. Unfortunately, there will probably be problems with hairpins anyway, as they will vanish, when the notes become invisible. In such cases, layered staffs might be the only solution ... but this certainly will not be part of that "simple convenience tool".
• RepeatMark.ms places brackets around the label:  (4), (6) etc.  That is preferable to the label currently generated by RepeatMark_ms.hmm.  Why?  I recently sight read a chart with many successive two-bar repeat signs, each of which had the required 2 over the symbol.  The chart also had small printed bar numbers above each bar line as well as labels showing the repeat iteration number.  Brackets around the label make it easier to differentiate from the other numbers.
  My modification has exactly the same behavior by default (single -> brackets, double -> no brackets) ... might be buggy right now; however, one can also choose the format explicitly, because neither B.B. nor the scores I have follow this convention.
• Each repeat sign seems to need to be entered manually, with labels (if needed) set individually. The numbers in the label don't seem to increment automatically (maybe I missed it).  Automatic would be better, since suppressing the label with 0 or setting the label requires some awkward mouse movement in the popup window.
  When one selects more than one bar in the user tool, the bars get incremented numbers.
• I wonder if the logic could work like the multibar rest sign?  Insert the tool in the bar after the one that is to be repeated, set the number of times it is to copy that bar, make the notes invisible and insert the sign, and give the user control over which repeat iterations get labelled.
  I thought about that also; right now, the "mark it and then run it" seems nicer - why should I count the bars? Your suggestion is, if I understand it correctly, also to copy the notes - but this is, from my experience, not the use case: You will have the copied notes already there (because you listened to them while arranging), and inserting repeat marks is just a final decision about appearance (which might be reversed for numerous reasons, e.g. that line or page breaks have to occur in the middle of the repeat sequence and the like).
• Each simile bar may be labelled with a number if the user wishes, but it's more common to only see the label every 4 or 6 bars. Your tool allows the label to be suppressed, but the best way to invoke that is simply set it up in the first repeat bar and copy that entire bar as many times as desired, changing the ones you want to label.
  Except for that one example in B.B. with the tremolos, I have never seen non-contiguous labels, I must say. But still - setting the labels in between to zero (i.e., suppress the label) is easy - just select the whole range over all user tools and set the label
  to zero for all of them with a single operation.

I'll try

• First, I did not want to pop up two dialogs, therefore I put the flag that says whether the symbol should appear into the sign of the label; but maybe the alternative design, with a separate checkbox dialog with default "show symbol" does not need more key hits ... I have not counted them.
• Second, for single staff printing, the user tool should add useful spacers.
• Last, the tool should make all the notes and dynamics (and what else??) invisible when applied.

• the separation of the notehead from the drawing method;
• for "double bar" noteheads, installed *Dings fonts and the standard NWC font are used (explicitly by the user and implicitly, based on availability); for "square" noteheads, installed *Dings fonts are used; "single bar" noteheads are always drawn as a semibreve head with two lines, as this symbol is not available in any font - as a consequence, there is now a huge if-then-else machinery for glyph selection;
• a number of symbol positionings are now better than before;
• correct support if another NWC note font is selected (an example with NWC2SwingDings notes shows this);
• and there is an example file AllBreveHeads.nwctxt showing all possible heads (but not over all fonts);

• Size problem should be fixed with 0.4.
• Germanic and Euro fonts removed from examples, but ...
• ... I left the dependency on Mensurstrich.hmm in the Play example - after all, the time of breves was also the time of no bars in music, i.e., where we now insert those small Mensurstriche.

• the double bar notehead is taken from the standard NWC font;
• the single bar notehead is drawn as a semibreve (whole) notehead with a line on each side;
• the square notehead is created by two Times New Roman letters 'I' that are rotated by 90 degrees (which makes the notehead a little too short).

• If not, then this is the problem: The file is not where NWC looks for user plugins. Place the file in that folder, and then hopefully all works fine.
• If it is, please check whether you installed it under some non-admin rights, so that it is not visible under normal Windows user rights. I confess I dont fully understand Windows here, but I know form first-hand experience that such things happen - I then open a cmd shell as "Administrator" and do the copying of the file in it, and then all works ... maybe you could try that.

• when opening NWC (which would indicate a problem with Beam.hmm's source code),
• or when opening an example .nwctxt file (which would either indicate that Beam.hmm is not installed at the expected folder, or again an error in the source code which for some reason does not occur on my computer)?

• Most important, the beam options for notes and rests under the beam have been changed from obscure symbols to (somewhat) understandable texts.
• The selection of the number of beams for a beam group is now on the start note of the beam group , i.e. the note after the reduced number of beams (similar to NWC's "Beam group start" option) - this seems a little more intuitive than the previous attempt, where one specified the beam reduction on its left side.
• The maximum span of a Beam object is now 16 notes and rests. If a longer beam group is needed, two or more overlapping beam objects can be defined (see extreme example in "ComplexGrouping.nwctxt").
• A span of 1 is also supported; this can be used for single beamed notes (see last example in "FractionalBeams.nwctxt").
• Stemlets for rests compute their length correctly.
• There is a rudimentary option for stemlets on notes (see last example in "Stemlets.nwctxt").
• Some more examples have been added.

• "SpeedVariationBeams" shows a notation that would drive our church choir crazy. This notation requires that all notes are eighths, because otherwise each user object (there is one for each slanting beam) would draw a second, unwanted parallel bar; if one wanted to play this, the varying tempo would have to be created by a tempo track.
• "Stemlets" shows a notation that connects rests to a beamed group. E.Gould writes: "This notation is helpful for passages of complex rhythms, especially where rests occupy the start or finish of a subdivision of a beat". One could also use it to mark special notes under a beam, as my last example shows.
• "DoubleBeams" shows double beams on a single staff, which can e.g. help with quickly notating SATB scores on two staffs.
• "Tuplets" shows how with tuplets, one can e.g. draw one single beam above somewhat lengthened sixteenth to create the impression of "short eighths".
• "DoubleStemmedBeams" (since 0.7) shows overlapping beams, with additional non-beamed notes on double-stemmed chords.
• "GraceBeams" (since 0.91) shows small to tiny beams with grace notes as well as CueHeads.
  

• "UnisonBeams" has three unison beam examples;
• "CrossStaffBeams" has a percussion example and two piano examples; the last - an excerpt from a piece by Webern - is, I would say, quite interesting ...
• "OppositeStemDirectionBeams" has some examples with stems in opposite directions (but the previous file also has some ...);
• "ComplexGrouping" has a single example with different numbers of connecting beams - NWC cannot do this, but I doubt that this is really an important feature;
• "FractionalBeams" shows an interesting way to indicate complex rhythms, which I have yet to see outside B.B.; and has single notes with beams.

  ['%%1/8%%']     = 'H',
  ['%%ppp%%']     = 'P',
...
    for k, v in pairs(replacements) do
      text = string.gsub(text, k, v)
    end

  ['%1/8%']     = 'H',
  ['%ppp%']     = 'P',