Re: Book with LilyPond, community of professionals

[Rodolfo Zitellini]

Hi Mike,


> LilyPond's native facilities for setting pure text are very crude. I
> think that you will need  to use LaTeX, or some similar system based on
> TeX, to get good layout of your text. I have used LaTeX/AMSTeX quite a
> bit to set mathematical works. You have probably already noticed
> lilypond-book, which helps you import short pieces of scores into a book
> formatted in LaTeX. Unfortunately, it appears not to help significantly
> with longer scores. In principle, you can just engrave the scores with
> LilyPond, then import them as encapsulated PostScript into a *TeX
> document. This makes you do the interaction between the two, such as
> reconciliation of page breaking and numbering, by hand. If you have very
> long scores interleaving with long texts, this isn't too bad, especially
> if you are satisfied with page breaks between scores and texts. Then,
> you can probably use lilypond-book to help import shorter quotes from
> the scores into the texts. The worst case is many alternations of scores
> that are just too long for lilypond-book with short segments of text. It
> is tempting to do the short pieces of text entirely within LilyPond, but
> I expect that this will produce highly unprofessional looking
> inconsistencies in the look.

The final book will be mostly music, the text is just an introduction
and some front matter.
My toolchain for the thesis will surely be latex + lilypond. I plan to
do all the front matter separately and then merge it with the music
produced in lilypond. Obviously I will have to tweak both latex and
lilypond output so they come out similar (just think of the position
of page numbers...), but I feel some little glitches can be accepted
(after all, they want the texts double spaced!).
BUT for a book, all the small details become (in my opinion) quite
important not to overlook. So margins should be similar, page numbers
positioned exactly in the same way and so on.
I think the idea of exporting all the pages and reimporting them in a
DTP could be valid.

I have used lilypond for some quite large projects (a 370-page
transcritption of a mass and salms is my record :) but everything was
without interleaved texts and not to be professionally published, so I
had less details to worry about :)

> I am also curious about the form of your planned transcription work. I
> started using LilyPond due to an interest in the Bodleian Canonici Misc
> 213 manuscript (I have a very nice and expensive photographic
> reproduction from The University of Chicago Press), which contains a the
> DuFay song, "Ce moys de may," which I was singing. I worked a bit on
> setting the mensural notation, but had to sideline it since it requires
> a lot of improvement in the basics of the LilyPond support for mensural
> notation. I had the idea of setting a series of versions of each song,
> starting with one that stays as close to the manuscript as possible
> while making each glyph more uniform and legible (this allows efficient
> proof reading against the manuscript, and serves as a basis for further
> editing), followed by a short series of versions moving away from the
> manuscript, and ending in one or more versions in modern notation for
> performance.

It will be a late eighteenth century notation, nothing that lilypond
can't handle quite well :)
It is a harpsichord theatise, with a very short intoduction and 24
exercises in the 24 keys in the form of partimenti and "example"
keyboard pieces (capricci, toccate, etc...). I plan to add a
not-so-lengthy introduction and realize the fugues outlined in the
"partimenti".

Ciao,
Rodolfo