Re: Scholarly footnotes

[Urs Liska]

Hi Graham,

now I'll try to go into that somewhat more detailed.

Am 09.11.2015 um 17:33 schrieb Graham King:

I'm preparing an edition of sixteenth-century polyphony, using the book-titling template[1].  The edition would benefit from some footnotes/endnotes (the sort that say things like: "contratenor 1, bar 99: semiminim A missing in MS").  How best to achieve this, while preserving the "book-titling" appearance? 

I've only looked at the description page of the book-titling template, but I don't see that it would affect any of this.
With regard to footnote/endnotes you should first decide about what you want. Footnotes are something completely different from endnotes, both conceptually *and* technically.

As two rules of thumb I'd point out that

• numerous footnotes would seem quite distracting, so if you expect to have many annotations you'd put them in an appendix
• footnotes on the page itself have a quite high "visibility".

A common approach is to use endnotes for the commentary in general and use footnotes to indicate the really important comments (i.e. those you really want the performer to notice). Sometimes you even have footnotes that only point to the commentary at the end.

Urs' marvellous work on ScholarLy[2] appears ideal, but outputs its annotations in Latex,

well, this is what is implemented so far ...

(and might have other problems - see separate thread[3]).

For the reference: This is now also in the archives, starting with
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2015-11/msg00187.html

So I'm now wondering how best to integrate this with a published score.  Several possibilities present themselves:

1) lilypond-book[4].  Requires extensive knowledge of Latex, and appears to be targetted at presenting small snippets within musicological papers, rather that large amounts of music with a small number of annotations.

Yes, I don't think that's what you need.

2) Latex with \includepdf[5].

I think this is the most straightforward approach. LaTeX would manage the volume as a whole, taking care of typesetting the textual parts and including the score(s). This wouldn't rule out having a LilyPond-created title page if you like that.

For your case that would mean you'd export the annotations to the LaTeX input file and use that from within the main LaTeX book file.
However, this would still require writing a package to actually typeset the critical report. This is something that is still missing, and I'd be happy about the opportunity (and also some assistance) to do something about it. So far I've only used custom, project-specific code to typeset commentaries, but we'd need a general package that provides the infrastructure while still being configurable.

3) musicexamples.sty[6].

I don't think this is for you. musicexamples' target is quite similar to lilypond-book. Or more concretely: you could use musicexamples' commands and environment to include lilypond-book like music snippets in a LaTeX document.

4) something else?

Another good approach is very straightforward - apart from the fact that it isn't implemented yet. It would be good for ScholarLY to provide a way to produce a report by itself, as markup within a LilyPond score.
I've never felt comfortable with writing markup in LilyPond so that would surely need significant advice from the list, but in principle it *should* be possible to write either

• a hook that outputs a report after the last page of the score or
• a command that inserts such a report at an arbitrary position
  (but I'm not sure if that can really be hooked in (what-information-is-present-at-what-stage-of-processing kind of question))

I think typesetting a report in LaTeX has some advantages regarding typsetting options and maybe versatility. But OTOH it would be good if ScholarLY could produce a proper report without forcing to have LaTeX to post-process it.

I have used Latex (once!) and I'm prepared to do some learning, but I'd welcome advice on the most efficient way to proceed, and the pros-&-cons of each approach.

I think 2) and 4) are principally equally appropriate, but to choose one out of them we'd need a better idea of the concrete project (but I can't ask specific questions about that).

Both approaches would require additional development, either the LaTeX code to handle the critical report or the same for LilyPond.

I assume that making LaTeX do what you want is the lower hanging fruit. And if development of a proper (i.e. generic) LaTeX package turns out to be complicated or takes too long it will always be possible to create a project-specific solution without serious problems. With the LilyPond-only approach I wouldn't make a guarantee yet if it's really achievable, although I assume so.

On the other hand this will add a second tool and thus an additional layer of complexity that may not be needed if you could achieve your goal directly from within a LilyPond score.

Then again, getting familiar with LaTeX may be a good investment anyway.

Regarding some abstract "public interest" I'd say 2) and 4) are similarly important and equally missing.

HTH
Urs

 
[1] From the Snippets Repository: http://lsr.di.unimi.it/LSR/Item?id=368
[2] http://lilypondblog.org/2015/01/introducing-scholarly/
[3] lilypond-user list, November 2015: "ScholarLy and polymetric music? (bar numbering, \RemoveEmptyStaffContext)"
[4] http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/usage/lilypond_002dbook
[5] http://lilypondblog.org/2013/07/creating-songbooks-with-lilypond-and-latex/
[6] http://openlilylib.org/musicexamples/index.html

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