Re: Cover page

[David Wright]

On Tue 11 Sep 2018 at 13:20:34 (-0400), Kieren MacMillan wrote:
> Hi fox,
> 
> > Does this means the PDF is imported in LaTex, a bit like with inDesign?
> 
> Not exactly… It’s included at PDF generation time, a bit like an \include 
> file in Lilypond.

Because both LP and LaTeX are text-sourced, it's really up to you how
you do this. Using my most integrated application for this sort of mix
as an example:

I have a collection of Anglican chants written in LP in their
canonical key, and each processed (automatically as required) in a
bash function to form a library of PDFs of each chant.

> > Don't you lose some margins precision?
> 
> Not that I’ve noticed. The file is simply included at full size.

The PDFs are automatically cropped to have a one-point margin, so
LaTeX is responsible for the whitespace, just as with any sort of
graphics inclusion.

> > Is it appropriate when you update your original score PDF?
> 
> It’s fabulous: I simply update the score, and then re-generate the LaTeX file.

Regenerating the PDFs when the source is edited is as easy as typing
$ chants
which is a bash function that reruns LP on any that have a newer .ly
timestamp than their PDF has. If I were to edit any of the .ily files
that control LP's chant production, then
$ chants x
will rerun LP on all of them (overriding the timestamp tests).

But that's the less useful part of the story. There's also a battery
of psalms and graduals, which are .tex files containing the pointed
words (like in psalters). These files contain macros with references
to the chants like {../chants/d-barnby-aminor} or indeed
{../chants/address@hidden where the latter indicates that I
want the chant transposed into Aflat on this occasion.

A python program, makepsalm.py, scans the psalm.tex file picking
up references to the various chants, runs sed to set any necessary
transpositions (all the chants contain a line in the format
keysig = { \key a \minor } giving the key in the source), runs
LP to produce ephemeral PDFs, then runs lualatex to produce the psalm
PDF with the ephemeral versions of all the chants embedded in the
document.

As a bonus, it produces a shell script and MIDI files that play the
sequence of chants in the correct keys to help singers with the key
changes between chants.

What you can do is really only limited by your ingenuity.

Cheers,
David.