RE: Style

[Carl D. Sorensen]

-----Original Message-----
From: David Feuer [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2006 9:57 AM
To: lily-devel
Subject: Style

I'm sure someone has brought this up before, but I've been thinking a
bit about the way users tweak output in Lilypond.  As it is, tweaks are
generally interspersed with actual music information.  This seems to
make things difficult when someone tries to maintain a part that has to
be transposed a couple different ways, or printed on different paper
sizes, or whatever.  The web deals with this problem through CSS, and I
would suggest that Lilypond might do something similar: let users name
timesteps, timestep edges, measures, and categories of such, and format
them according to a separate program.  Obviously this would be loads of
work, and I don't even know if it would be feasible, but that's what I'm
thinking.

David Feuer


________________

Carl Sorensen here:

But this flies in the very face of Lilypond's objective.  The objective
for lilypond is to have an automatic engraver that takes the music
information and creates a beautiful engraved score.  We don't want to
tweak output, we want to eliminate all tweaks.

Rather than use the effort to develop the tweaking system as a separate
program, lilypond would prefer to use the effort to improve the engraver
algorithms so no tweaking is necessary.  Tweaks are (hopefully
temporary) hacks to deal with weakness in the engraving algorithms.

Lilypond has considered (and rejected) the Sibelius method of generating
engraved output, then tweaking this output to produce the final output.
While it's harder, I'm convinced that the Lilypond way is the
fundamentally better way.

Carl Sorensen