Re: FW: Professional ???

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Christian Mondrup <address@hidden> writes:

> of course there is not.  A composer's choice of graphic notation
> will most often intendedly be more or less open to the performer's
> interpretation.

Well, most of the ink that lilypond puts on a page has rather well
defined musical meaning.  Lilypond is not good at interpreting music
that is open to speculation.  Otoh, it would be relatively easy to add
some features to cover arbitrary parts of the sheet with ink.

> The only score I have available at hand just now is the score of Kr.
> Penderecki's "Polyforphia" for 48 strings from 1961 (from the
> commercial! publisher Moeck Verlag) containing lots of curves, lines and
> patterns as part of the notation. But there are lots of other examples
> from the post 2nd world war avantgarde music.

Again, this is a too non-specific.  I have seen some 20 century music
that could arguably easiest be typeset using the GIMP.  If you want to
support contemporary music, you should start by identifying the most
needed features.  This is how various contributers are working to
support medieval music.

> I see your point of view as a not very constructive and unnecessary
> fundamentalism.  As a devoted long time user of GNU software (and
> contributor to the GNU lilypond documentation) I don't see any point
> in excluding serious, even if non-free, software from a discussion
> of how to meet special notational needs.

Maybe you misunderstand me.  I just don't want to see any suggestions
or advocacy for, or discussions about, non-free softwares packages
that may fill a particular practical need.  This is not the place, you
should take that to another forum, eg, rec.music.compose.

Otoh, if there is a specific feature of a non-free software that you
think is really useful to have in LilyPond, we would like to discuss
that.

> Besides I would not dream of making any attempts of killing neither
> the excellent works of the Mup development staff nor those of the
> Lilypond staff.

No killing, please :-)

When a program can perform some specific trick, that other programs
cannot do, and the absence of that trick makes other programs almost
worthless (for the task at hand), we speak of a ``killer feature''.

When you said

> obvious typesetting choice since it offers access to line- and curve
> drawing commands needed for some branches of contemporary notation.

you confused me a bit.  I was thinking: a computer programmer and GNU
contributer suggests using non-free typesetting software, mainly
because it can draw arbitrary lines.  Why not go ahead and add such a
small feature to Lilypond, and advocate using that?

Here are some not-really-supported but simple ways of drawing lines:

    \header {
    texidoc="
    Draw abritrary lines.  This brings LilyPond on par with Mup?
    ";
    }

    \score {
      \notes {
        a-#"\\special{ps: 0 0 moveto 200 200 lineto stroke}"
        b-#"\\special{ps: 0 0 moveto 0 0 10 20 80 40 200 30 curveto stroke}"
        a-#"\\embeddedps{0 0 moveto 20 20 lineto stroke}"
        b-#"\\embeddedps{0 0 moveto 0 0 1 2 8 4 20 3 curveto stroke}"
      }
    }

I don't really know what kind of lines you want to draw, so maybe you
can do some suggestions.  What kind of lines/curves do you need, how
would you want to enter them?

Greetings,
Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org