Re: Lilypond-book and xelatex [was: Re: Lilypond-book not working after installing Python 3]

[Mats Bengtsson]

Joseph Wakeling wrote:
> Graham Percival wrote:
>   
> > If you know python, or don't count time learning it towards the
> > estaimte, then 5 hours for basic usability.  Maybe 15 for using
> > advanced xelatex stuff?
> >
> > Note that I don't know what the difference is between xelatex and
> > pdflatex; I'm just going on the fact that they both act on text
> > and graphics files, and lilypond-book produces text and graphics
> > files.
> >     
>
> Well, based on my (brief, wholly inadequate...) experience, based purely
> on LaTeX and never before touching on Lilypond, a file that compiles
> with pdflatex should also compile with xelatex -- the converse of course
> is not true, because xelatex allows for utf-8 input
Which latex does as well if you use
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
>  and has nice
> features to let it work with OTF fonts.
>
> A couple of brief tests saw no problem with doing the following:
>
> lilypond-book --pdf myfile.lytex
> xelatex myfile.tex
>
> ... 
> So my feeling is that xelatex is probably substantially fine to use as
> the .tex compiler, so long as lilypond-book is run with the --pdf
> option.  There are probably tweaks that can be made, but much will work
> without them.
>   
Basically, lilypond-book just replaces blocks of LilyPond code with a 
number of
\includegraphics{...}
commands, so as long as you use a latex variant that understands the 
\includegraphics command then it should work out of the box.

However, I just simplified things a bit. What really happens, in 
addition to what I just said, is that lilypond-book extracts the head of 
the file (everything before \begin{document}) and copies it into a 
temporary file where the main part of the file has been replaced by a 
few \typeout commands that spit out information on the line width used 
in the document, when the temporary file is ran through latex. This is 
then used in lilypond-book to automatically set the line width of each 
lilypond score to match the line width used in the text parts of the 
document. By default, the temporary file is ran through "latex", but you 
can change this using
lilypond-book --latex-program=xelatex ...
or whatever latex variant you want to use. In recent lilypond versions, 
it automatically uses "pdflatex" if you specify the --pdf flag.

Without knowing anything specifically about xelatex, I don't really see 
what would have to be changed in lilypond-book itself to support 
xelatex. Please try using
lilypond-book --latex-program=xelatex ...
and see if there are any remaining problems.

   /Mats
> Best wishes,
>
>     -- Joe
>
>
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>   

--
=============================================
        Mats Bengtsson
        Signal Processing
        School of Electrical Engineering
        Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)
        SE-100 44  STOCKHOLM
        Sweden
        Phone: (+46) 8 790 8463                         
       Fax:   (+46) 8 790 7260
        Email: address@hidden
        WWW: http://www.s3.kth.se/~mabe
=============================================