Sibelius to LilyPond (Was: Sibelius Software UK office shuts down)

[Johan Vromans]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> That sounds like we could at least link to it.  Since it requires
> proprietary software for running, I don't think it makes sense to host
> or even maintain it as part of LilyPond, but pointing to it should not
> be a problem.

I've put the Sib2Ly tools on GitHub:

https://github.com/sciurius/sib2ly.git

SIB2LY is developed by Kirill Sidorov and licensed under the GPL.
Kirill has changed priorities and will not actively maintain the
program for the time being.

I use SIB2LY on a regular base, and decided to make Kirill's work
available via GitHub.

The GitHub repo has two branches: master and alpha. The master branch
is what I use and made some modifications to. It is fairly stable and
does a lot of good and useful work.

The alpha branch contains the latest modifications by Kirill and is
very unstable, i.e., it doesn't work. I may have a look at his
modifications and incorporate them in the master branch.

Introductionary notice (by Kirill Sidorov):

SIB2LY is a tool for exporting Sibelius scores and translating them into
the language of LilyPond for typesetting the most beautiful scores.
While LilyPond is by far the best tool today to typeset professionally
looking music, many musicians still find the non-WYSIWYG way of editing
intimidating. Sibelius, being one of the few non-evil WYSIWIG notation
editors, is appealing to musicians as it allows a convenient way of
editing scores and seeing them at the same time. While I remain an
advocate of non-WISYWIG typesetting of texts (forever a user of LaTeX),
typesetting music, essentially a graphical language, is harder this way.
Therefore, a combination of the two paradigms -- WISIWYG for entering
and editing of music and non-WYSIWYG approach to final tuning and
camera-ready typesetting -- is attractive. Hence `sib2ly`.

With `sib2ly`, the conversion (or rather, translation) is a two-stage
process. First, one runs an export plugin in Sibelius. The plugin is
minimalistic in design and simply reads through all the staves in the
score and dumps all the score objects, along with meta-data such as
title, composer, etc., into an .xml file. One then runs the `sib2ly`
_interpreter tool_ on the generated .xml dump to finally produce a
LilyPond source. The rationale for this is as follows. The original
attempt at `sib2ly` was in the form of a self-contained plugin that
would do all the translation. However, as many new features were added,
and as more and more special cases were dealt with, the `sib2ly` plugin
grew into monstrosity, got unmanageable, unmaintainable, slow, and
started tu run into limitations of the ManuScript language. Soon it
became clear that a different approach is required to handle all the
complexities of the language of music. Therefore, the `sib2ly` _suite_
now consists of a dumb Sibelius plugin, and an intelligent interpreter
that translates the music into the target LilyPond language. This
ensures better extensibility and maintainability.

-- Johan