XML export to facilitate braille music

[Ralph Little]

Hi,
I notice from recent times that a few people are interested in MusicXML 
output from Lilypond.

I have been approached by a programmer who is interested in helping me 
with my efforts to produce braille output by going the XML approach. I 
think this would be easier than trying to get the braille thing off the 
ground as there is a python XML->braille project that someone has 
started already: http://delysid.org/freedots.html. The freedots project 
does not seem to be very mature at this point but I think that it will 
be simpler to have a separate tool for Braille generation.

I think offloading the braille job to them and concentrating on XML 
output would be easier and much more profitable.

I think I briefly saw a discussion on this regarding how much content 
could be extracted to insert into the XML. Currently, using Erik's 
interface method, structure could be exported in a fairly 
straightforward manner, but positional information from Lilypond's 
layout engine would be much harder to extract. For the purposes of what 
we require, the layout information is not really required. Therefore, we 
propose to just extract the structure and leave the positional 
information for a later time. I think the back-end implementation would 
be largely the same anyway.

We propose to link to the LGPL MusicXML library if there are no objections:

http://libmusicxml.sourceforge.net

This library is pretty mature and covers all the bases I think.

What do people think?

Regards,
Ralph