Re: Draft: Extended mensural notation support

[David Kastrup]

Lukas Pietsch <address@hidden> writes:

> a few of you might remember a set of extensions I once drafted for enhanced
> mensural notation support in Lilypond, including black mensural notation.
> I've been working on this project on and off in the meantime and now have
> something far more stable and technically mature (I hope) than when I first
> presented it here.
>
> Recently I have been in contact with Prof. Giuliano Di Bacco of Indiana
> University, who has been discussing an exciting project with me. They
> consider using Lilypond, with mensural extensions, as a rendering backend
> for the display of medieval notation snippets contained in a large corpus of
> medieval writings on music theory, the "Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum"
> (TML). The notation samples, which include numerous highly uncommon and
> idiosyncratic forms, will be encoded in the corpus in an XML-based format
> (an extension of the "Music Encoding Initiative", MEI), with a script to
> transform them into Lilypond code for rendering. The University might offer
> a bit of funding for completing the Lilypond extensions and writing the
> conversion script.
>
> I have a working draft of the Lilypond coding, which involves quite a
> bit of Scheme code, a patched Lilypond font with a section of new
> proposed glyphs, and a few minor patches to Lilypond's C++
> codebase. Unfortunately, owing to the latter, the whole system
> currently works only with a patched, custom-compiled Lilypond
> installation. I'd like to hear if there's interest among the Lilypond
> folks to merge these extensions into the standard distribution, and
> how best to proceed to do so.

You state "The notation samples, which include numerous highly uncommon
and idiosyncratic forms, will be encoded in the corpus in an XML-based
format".  If the forms are highly uncommon and idiosyncratic, can they
be described by an XML-based expressions that are _not_ highly uncommon
and idiosyncratic?

For me the most important question arising is not as much whether we
should merge your support for a particular set of uncommon and
idiosyncratic notation, but rather what kind of support we would need in
LilyPond such that this and other forms of uncommon and idiosyncratic
notations can be supported _without_ recompilation of LilyPond.

Do you have an idea how LilyPond could be generally better for such
tasks out of the box?

-- 
David Kastrup