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Re: Do we really offer the future?
From: |
James Harkins |
Subject: |
Re: Do we really offer the future? |
Date: |
Thu, 23 Apr 2015 12:42:48 +0800 |
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On April 22, 2015 7:43:10 PM "Trevor Daniels" <address@hidden> wrote:
Although not well-publicised there is a way of entering multi-voice or
multi-staff music complete bar by complete bar. There is a restriction
that bars must be all the same length, but at least all the notes of a bar
are entered together and remain close together in the LP source.
See
http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation/multiple-voices#writing-music-in-parallel
Thanks for the tip - I wasn't aware of this. I'm outside on my phone now,
not ideal for reading the documentation, so I can't comment specifically
except to guess that it may be impractical for large, complex projects.
Going back to the general topic: I don't think the solution is necessarily
to extend the LilyPond language. LP is *very* good at what it does. But
David's comment that LP is a language to organize grobs, rather than
*principally* a language to organize music, is insightful. Viewed this way,
it's then unsurprising that LP, in a couple of glaring ways, doesn't always
mesh with the needs of working musicians.
The fact that LP is so good at what it does means that it's quite likely a
bad idea to alter its nature fundamentally. But a higher-level
representation could abstract the details of LP code organization away from
the user and present a "face" that supports more "musical" editing
capabilities. That's a massive job, of course, but it would also not break
backward compatibility with existing LP projects.
I'm influenced here by my experience with LaTeX, which I use almost
exclusively by way of Emacs's org-mode [1]. In org, I make outlines where
the outline entries are sections or subsections (or Beamer frames), with
free text and itemized lists inside. Org markup is lighter and friendlier
than raw LaTeX: *bold* instead of \textbf{bold}, e.g., so I get the
advantage of improved readability while editing without losing LaTeX's
superior typesetting. The org exporter converts the outline tree into LaTeX
and automatically runs the LaTeX executable of your choice. I need to write
raw LaTeX only for customizing, and a couple of corner cases that org
doesn't handle easily. It's >expletive deleted< GREAT!!
For LP, this is pie-in-the-sky dreaming -- I haven't the time or the
immediate need. And GridLY may supply some of this -- I'm quite interested
and I'll take a look for my next project. But I think there's no harm in
admitting that LP is not ideally suited to many practical needs, and
imagining that abstraction (rather than extension of the core language) is
a valid solution.
hjh
[1] http://orgmode.org
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- Re: Do we really offer the future?, (continued)
Re: Do we really offer the future?, Richard Shann, 2015/04/22
Re: Do we really offer the future?, Trevor Daniels, 2015/04/22
Re: Do we really offer the future?, Kieren MacMillan, 2015/04/22