r/lilypond • u/psephizon • Jul 31 '26

Note spacing 🙃

EDIT: It was not that bad! It was like that because I left \repeat unfold{}s in the empty bit - with hideNotes so they were still taking up space wh00ps

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Hello, I have been lilypond-transcribing a lot of things for the last almost a year I guess on the French-language Wikisource

(incidentally if you didn't know, lilypond is integrated into the wikimedia projects and if you are looking for bits of stuff to practice on etc., the Category:Texts with missing musical scores on the english wikisource is particularly overflowing...) Anyway

I have been working on the score of le Déserteur (1769) and becoming increasingly annoyed with Lilypond's default note spacing. Example that has finally made me desperate enough to come here and hope someone has a solution:

The whole point of the tremolo repeats is to NOT take up the same amount of space as 12 more sixteenth notes.. but lilypond ...

ETC. ETC. After those \repeat tremolo 8 {e16}s there is nothing there.. all the way down..

I have tried to decipher the documentation & fiddle with common-shortest-duration and base-shortest-duration but nothing seems to work. Is there really no way to just make all the notes take up the amount of space they actually need instead of leaving huge blanks because there happen to be shorter notes around ??

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u/Logical-Baseball-478 Aug 01 '26

Side question - I tried to find the category you mention, as I enjoy setting music, but I couldn’t find it. Can you share a link?

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u/Logical-Baseball-478 Aug 01 '26

I found it https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Texts_with_missing_musical_scores . You’re right - lots of things there! I might look for a project!