NOTATIO

I have always preferred, both aesthetically and informationally, slurs & ties pointing toward the center of the notehead – where possible. Of course sometimes it is not, especially with very short slurs. As long as they seem obviously to connect the noteheads, they appear to my eye to be doing t...

Just another vote firmly on the side of Knut allowing the slur to cross the stem of a flat. Never the bowl, of course! To a lesser extent the stems of a natural can be crossed by a slur or tie without reducing legibility. Sharps you can’t cross because there isn’t enough room. To my eye crossing is ...

The main difference I notice between the original and Knut’s recopy is that the original preserves the pitch relationship of the grand staff to the instrument, so you can see where the notes lie irrespective of which hand plays them. Knut’s clef change clarifies the rhythm, the sequence of pitches, ...

Fascinating. The idea of asymmetrical slur thickness never occurred to me. (Curvature, yes.) In the first examples the asymmetry is subtle enough that I thought it was unintentional, at first look. But in OCTO’s last example I think I’m seeing a different principle: the thickness appears centered on...

I have found SCORE output often pleases my eye before I look closely enough to identify it. This is probably because (a) the default glyph designs are reasonably good, and (b) the software requires so much effort that only those who really know what they’re doing bother with it any more. So the resu...

I suspect we were using the term voices (now layers) in different ways here. … Regardless of the how the music is entered, it is clear that the upper chord still should be termed layer 1 and the bass notes layer 2, even if the stems are flipped opposite their default directions. It depends whether ...

No objection from me about the misuse of the word ‘voice’ (Sibelius’s term). ‘Layer’ works fine for this purpose. @Knut: I tried it in Sibelius, and I have to admit in this case your way ends up easier, only because the articulations are on the note sides (unusually for 2 layers). Normally I still w...

Props for the Chopin page! I have done the note entry for that passage too, out of curiosity, and found it delightfully doable in Sibelius, though I didn’t make it publication-ready as you did. Beautiful job. I confess that I have gone to PDF for a lot of my score needs. But for much longer than tha...

I couldn’t agree more, John. At first glance the reversed stem directions look as if the editor misunderstands the purpose of layers or voices in software in the first place: The point is not that Voice 2 has to be below Voice 1 in register, it’s simply that the stems default to opposite directions....

I believe there will always be aspects of spacing and layout that can be improved for human consumption by a human designer, over the results of any possible algorithm. This goes for typesetting as well, though that is obviously simpler. I believe the reason for this is that the works we are copying...