Re: Debugger; draft mode

[Valentin Villenave]

2008/1/6, Reilly <address@hidden>:
> I am ignorant of what is possible or available in Lilypond.

> (1) I am working on a symphony (22 staves) which takes more than 20
> minutes to compile and the time increases rapidly as I add more music
> to the score. I have developed a work around for "proofing" my input: I
> compile individual parts which take about 15 seconds. This is okay for
> checking note entry. But I also need to check part alignment
> vertically. Gosh, it is easy to get a measure off, especially when I
> rewrite an early section of the music. Would it be possible to add a
> \draft mode to Lilypond which would ignore markups, text, dynamics, and
> formatting and just do the music (4 bars to a line or something), so I
> can do a quick read-through of the score?  (Yes, I do know that
> Lilypond offers a feature to process only the most recent music ---
> this does not help me).

This is great to see your mail: as it happens, we were just talking
with Rune the other day about some possibility to implement such a
feature. It definitely would be a HUGE improvement in LilyPond, and
since I'm writing a 300 pages opera, I know what you're talking about
:)

This answer is unfortunately: no at this time. It might be technically
possible but it would require several developers to work full-time on
it. We could start a fundraising but I'm afraid we would never have
enough money to actually pay coders so that they could make a living
out of it; only organizations sponsored by companies can achieve such
things (e.g. the Mozilla or the Wikimedia Foundation).

So, the only way to hope that such a thing will happen someday is a
very long shot:
-spread LilyPond everywhere you can,
-use it,
-use LilyPond scores,
-talk about it,
-make other people use it,
-make other people love it,
-and possibly in the end some official structures will be interested
in spending some money in it.

For example, LilyPond is starting to be used in music-education in
some European countries; if it became official, maybe some local
governments would contribute to its development.

Another idea from Rune: maybe in the end some music publishing
companies will understand they'd better use LilyPond instead of paying
proprietary licenses, hundreds of copyists, and however still printing
miserable scores ;)

> (2) I use TeXShop for my LaTeX. A superb program with an excellent
> debugger. When I process a LaTeX file, if the compiler encounters an
> error, it stops and offers me an option via a click button to "go to
> error." Usually the error precedes this location, but it does give me a
> start in debugging. I do not find the  Lilypond compiler window helpful
> --- in fact, I usually find it very confusing because the error
> messages are murshky-murshky to me. One misplace } can lead to 39 SCM
> error files messages. Perhaps, the limitation is in me?

Actually, I find that the error messages provided by LilyPond are
quite useful. The program indicates the line where something's wrong,
and it's generally easy to find it yourself.

Otherwise, i don't remember if you're planning to upgrade to Tiger or
Leopard someday (better wait for a few months before installing
Leopard though), but as soon as you'll have a 1.5 Java version, you'll
be able to install and use the great jEdit text editor, alongside with
its special plugin called LilyPondTool:
http://lilypondtool.organum.hu/87.0.html

One of it's most useful features is that it detects syntax errors as
you're typing, and underlines them in red, so that you can correct
mistakes without even having to compile your score!

It works under Windows, Linux, and Mac 10.4 (yes, my girlfriend has
10.3.9 too, and I know how frustrating these compatibility issues
are).

Cheers,
Valentin