Re: high-quality typesetting within lilypond

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

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Am Freitag, 5. Dezember 2008 schrieb Werner LEMBERG:
> I wonder how we are going to get high-quality typesetting within
> lilypond.  This is a fundamental question: I think we shouldn't extend
> lilypond so that it is contains a complete typesetting engine;
> instead, we should rather look for alternatives.
>
> I see two possibilities.
>
>   . We come to the conclusion that rendering with Pango is sufficient;
>     in case there are still deficiencies we should improve interaction
>     with Pango or ask the Pango people to implement what we need.  If
>     someone wants more, he or she should use lilypond-book.  Arguably,
>     this is the way to go, at least for now, since it is simple and
>     straightforward (and it has already been added to lilypond).

The problem is that embedded scores in lilypond-book have a noticably worse 
vertical layout, because each staff is included as a separate image and the 
rest is left to latex. This makes all the nice skyline-dependent spacing moot. 

For example, look at the documentation of OrchestralLily:
http://kainhofer.com/orchestrallily/orchestrallily.pdf
http://kainhofer.com/orchestrallily/A-simple-example.html#A-simple-example

The example on p.4 (displayed number; 8th page of the pdf) of the PDF has 
absolutely terrible vertical spacing, since each object is created as a 
separate image and then passed on to latex to lay out the page. The image in 
the HTML version, though, is directly generated by lilypond and thus shows 
proper vertical spacing.

There are also other issues, for example the TOC in section 8.5 
(http://kainhofer.com/orchestrallily/Simple-examples.html#Table-of-contents or 
p.23 of the PDF) has problems both in the HTML-version as well as in the pdf 
version:
- -) In the HTML version, the page references are not properly determined and 
appear as ? instead. Running the test case through lilypond manually works 
fine.
- -) In the PDF version, the same problem appears, plus all lines are spaced 
far 
too much...

Other problems appear with line-breaks and multi-staff pieces. The staves will 
not be properly stretched to fill the page nicely. Instead white space will be 
inserted.


>   . Use another, external typesetting library which can be linked to
>     lilypond.  For example, there have been attempts to create such a
>     library for TeX.  I have to dig out the details, but it sounds
>     interesting.

yes, that definitely sounds interesting.

Cheers,
Reinhold

- -- 
- ------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
email: address@hidden, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial and Actuarial Mathematics, TU Wien, http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/
 * K Desktop Environment, http://www.kde.org, KOrganizer maintainer
 * Chorvereinigung "Jung-Wien", http://www.jung-wien.at/
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