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.
Home