Re: MEI to LilyPond conversion

[Urs Liska]

Am Dienstag, den 21.01.2020, 10:09 +0100 schrieb Jacques Menu:
> Hello folks,
> 
> MEI has been mentionned at the Salzburg conference as more and more
> used in the academic circles. 
> 
> Jan-Peter said that an MEI to Lily translator would be useful, and
> RISM’s Laurent Pugin presented Verovio (
> https://www.verovio.org/index.xhtml), which features an XSL/XSLT such
> translator named MEIler (MEI Lilypond Engraving Refinement, 
> https://github.com/rettinghaus/meiler).
> 

MEIler is independent from Verovio, and developed by Klaus Rettinghaus
privately.

> My questions are: do you feel the need for a MEI to LilyPond
> translator, and has anyone experience with MEIler?

a)
There is a *strong* need for a reliable and fast translator from MEI to
LilyPond (and vice versa) to make LilyPond an acceptable tool in the
digital edition community.
Currently Verovio is the community's darling, and while it is superior
to LilyPond in one respect (and an important one for that community) it
is succinctly inferior in another respect. Currently the tendency in
the MEI community seems to be to accept this inferiority and be sort-of 
happy with incomplete and suboptimal engraving, just like society
accepted awful matrix printers for the first DTP possibilities.

b)
I once did a larger project with it, and I'd say that while it is a
surprisingly good tool it is not a "real" solution to the problem: it's
too slow and not really scalable.

Urs

> 
> Thanks for your help!
> 
> JM
> 
>