Re: MusicXML backend for lilypond?

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

Am Mittwoch, 18. Juni 2008 schrieb Han-Wen Nienhuys:
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 3:18 AM, Reinhold Kainhofer
>
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Now that musicxml2ly has been noticed as doing quite a good job, I'm
> > thinking of adding a MusicXML backend to lilypond, so that we can also
> > produce MusicXML and export lilypond scores to e.g. Finale, etc.
>
> The last time we looked at this, I think the resolution was to dump a
> music stream from LilyPond and postprocess that.  Read Erik's thesis
> (available from the lilypond website) to gain some insight in the
> design.

Thanks for the hint, but unfortunately, the stream does only contain the 
musical content in time-sorted order. MusicXML, however, also contains (or 
rather, can contain) full information about page layout, breaks, object 
positioning and similar settings (this has been extended a lot with MusicXML 
2.0). Since the stream is generated before the layouting stage, there won't 
be any way to produce MusicXML files containing full page layout. In 
musicxml2ly, of course, I simply ignore any layouting information present in 
the file, because lilypond probably will do the job just as well ;-)

Since Lilypond produces a layout that is far superior to any other notation 
program (well, except for the vertical spacing of multi-staff 
groups/systems....), of course, I'd also like to include that information in 
the xml files... [1]

Cheers,
Reinhold

[1] This is also my plan "B" for my orchestral scores: Currently it seems that 
lilypond's page layout is not suited for full orchestral scores with choir 
staves. If I can't implement proper vertical stretching (which produces 
professional spacing/stretching with nested groups, staves with lyrics, 
etc.), then my only way out is to switch to another notation program to 
produce camera-ready scores...

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
email: address@hidden, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial and Actuarial Mathematics, TU Wien, http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/
 * K Desktop Environment, http://www.kde.org, KOrganizer maintainer
 * Chorvereinigung "Jung-Wien", http://www.jung-wien.at/