Re: Lilypond's SVG output

[Mike Solomon]

On Aug 19, 2011, at 10:04 AM, Sandor Spruit wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I recently had an informal discussion with some collegues on the use of SVG, 
> in
> general. They are in music research, I am a developer working on a completely
> unrelated topic - so please forgive me my ignorance w.r.t. music-related
> terminology.
> 
> We discussed the possibilities to use music scores on web pages, and they
> immediately referred to Lilypond because of its quality output. While browsing
> this list's archives, and other on-line discussions for that matter, two
> questions came up:
> 
> - In what version, exactly, did Lilypond drop the use of groups (svg:g) in its
> output?
> 

LilyPond still uses groups.  grep "<g" in scm/output-svg.scm.

> I read a debate on this issue, where the key argument against groups was the
> trouble people have in editing grouped SVG elements in Inkscape. I can, 
> however,
> imagine all sorts of situations in which group elements could be very useful -
> from a developer's point of view at least. This leads to the second question:
> 
> - For what purpose are people putting music up on the web; what's the typical
> use case?
> 

Check the list archives for an e-mail from Michael Geary.  He's working on this.
I do it too for my musical compositions (http://www.apollinemike.com/norman1).

> Just publishing it for others to read? Hyperlinking to it, from it? 
> Annotations?
> Keeping bits and pieces of music for later reference? Learning? Studying?
> Comparing versions?
> 

There is no formal hub that groups these efforts together, but as the SVG 
standard becomes better supported by more and more browsers, I'm sure it'll get 
picked up by more and mor epeople.

> I may, at some point, be in the position to do some work on this. But I'm
> hesitant to dive in at the deep end - meaning Lilypond tens of thousands of
> lines of code ...
> 

You don't need to jump into tens and thousands of lines of LilyPond code - all 
of the svg backend is present in output-svg.scm.
Michael Geary is likely to be sponsoring some work on this too - I'll keep you 
posted if/when this happens.

Cheers,
MS