More About Sly

What is this About?

If you haven't worked with LilyPond, the music typesetting program, get it and typeset something small before you even bother to read on.

Sly is Mainly a Format, Not a Program

Editing a LilyPond (.ly) file with more than two parts in it or longer than sixteen measures or so is very difficult, partly because you have to shuffle back and forth through the score to find the same measure in the different voices.

Fortunately, you can use \include "gub-pt1.ly" to put notes in your LilyPond (gub.ly) file. Sly takes each column and appends -pt[number].ly to the name of your choice according to the number of the column so you can consider that column a part of your .ly score. Of course there is an opportunity to filter the content of the column as it becomes the included part.

The idea of sly is to simply arrange the voices in vertical columns so that the content of each measure in all the voices is shoulder to shoulder, so to speak. No more jumping around, no more iron discipline to put in something like % meas 25 every five measures or so in all the parts, and having to renumber if you copy something.

Finding Errors

LilyPond will give you the line of an error in the -ptn.ly file. This corresponds to the line in your .sly score. That corresponds to the measure, or will if you choose to do it that way. How sweet it is.

Moving Bits About

Copying measures is copying lines of the .sly score. Sly-mate will transform the columns into lines and the lines into columns, to make it very easy to move parts about or add them.

Ptfilter.sed

Is an empty file or a filter, your choice. You can do some very useful things to save typing with simple substitution. For example, you can blank out eight measures of a part in one easy operation, without having to count measures and put ``Silent'' rests in one bar at a time. Just use @tacet at the beginning of the desired blanked part and @attacca at the end.

Prettification

Sly-tidy straightens up the columns for rectangular editing, not to mention making the score much easier to read.

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