Re: battle-plan for 2.5 development

[Juergen Reuter]

Hi,

some general comments:

On Fri, 5 Nov 2004, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:

> ...
> 
> COMMUNICATION
> 
> The development team should be present at the 2005 Linux Audio
> Developers Meeting (april 2005) in Karlsruhe. This requires writing a
> paper, which I plan to do myself. Nevertheless, interested writers are
> welcome to contact me, should they wish to attend as well. For
> example, it would be interesting to have a case-study of "advanced"
> LilyPond use.
>

The web page for the upcoming meeting (21-24 April 2005) is at 
http://www.zkm.de/lac/
and the page of the previous meeting is still available at:
http://www.zkm.de/lad/

The LAD people have further material (slides, papers, fotos, etc.):
http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad/eventszkm2003.php3
http://www.linuxdj.com/audio/lad/eventszkm2004.php3


The past two meetings, strictly speaking you did not need to write a paper 
to attend and also did not have to pay a fee for attendance.  However, the 
meeting seems getting more and more professional with respect to the 
quality of the papers and presentations, and therefore I expect that 
sooner or later there will be a formal registration process.  By the way, 
I am planning to submit a paper (not about lily, but on image-to-audio 
transformation), i.e. I will very likely participate!


> * Right now, there are a bunch of programs that try to export (and
>   even: import) .ly files. This is rather impractical for a number of
>   reasons. It would be much better if we could read and write .ly
>   files in XML (or similar format). This should be thought of along
>   the lines of the to-xml.ly example file.

Maybe this could also solve some of the convert-ly problems.  At least, 
applying XSL transformations sounds to me much more sound than simple 
character replacement based on regular expressions.


> I invite you all to follow this example, and post where you would like
> to steer LilyPond to. To keep the discussion focused, please respond
> with what you plan to contribute rather than what you want to have.

As usual, I am running too many projects at the same time...  I probably 
will not be able to create major contributions before March.  However, as 
a (hopefully) rather small project, I am going to introduce high-level 
ligature macros (roughly following the informal code fragment table at the 
end of section 5.16.10.2 in the user manual).  The high-level syntax will 
look very close to what MusixTeX and OpusTeX do; however, the 
implementation will map to the current, much more flexible, low-level 
language, while MusixTeX and OpusTeX use a simple hard-coded mapping from 
high-level syntax to metafont glyphs.  The idea of having an additional 
low-level language (as currently implemented in lily) is to abstract from 
a particular notation style (such as vaticana versus hufnagel), such that 
conversion between them becomes trivial for the user (i.e. just plugging 
in different backends for the same input syntax by selecting a particular 
ligature-engraver).

Greetings,
Jürgen