Re: Gotlandstoner

[Erik Ronström]

>> I just wanted to say that in July, we published a reprint of Gotlandstoner, 
>> a collection of about 500 traditional fiddle tunes from Gotland, Sweden. The 
>> reprint was typeset with Lilypond.
> 
> Impressive! Could you describe the production process for this? In the 
> PDF properties I can see references to LuaTeX and TeX Live 2016, so I'm 
> guessing that's what produced it. Was lilypond-book used there? I have 
> dreams of doing a project this size, and I'm still trying to understand 
> the best way to structure it.

I’m glad you asked! :)

1) One-time conversion from abc files to lilypond ”notes files” – lilypond 
source, but only the notes (and key and time signatures etc)

2) The ”notes files” are combined with a song template using a config file, to 
produce lilypond ”song files” – complete lilypond documents

3) The song files are run through lilypond to produce pdf files

4) The text information from the abc source is extracted and inserted into a 
book template, again using the config file, to produce a ”book document” in 
latex format, which also includes the individual song pdf files

5) The latex document is run through LuaLaTEX

I didn’t use lilypond-book as I needed more control over the process, but the 
overall principle is the same. Apart from the first one-time conversion from 
abc, all steps are scripted and a hash is appended to the names of all 
generated files, so that changing a single tune (in the ”notes file”) requires 
only a single terminal command to rebuild the complete book, and only the 
affected song is recompiled.

Having the entire project under version control has been a big help, I can 
highly recommend using git (or something similar) for any bigger Lilypond 
project!

Feel free to check out the project on github 
(https://github.com/erikronstrom/gotlandstoner)! The bin folder contains all 
the scripts (but be warned that the code is a bit messy and mostly 
undocumented). Most scripts are written in perl.

If you have any more specific questions, also feel free to email me privately!

Regards
Erik