xelatex text block in markups

[Jan-Peter Voigt]

Hello lists,

I made up a markup command, to include latex-formatted text. Well, I 
don't want to "get rid of lilypond-book" like some people wrote on this 
list, but I want the oppertunity, to include a well formatted text on my 
first page of a book with several pieces of music.
I used to take http://lsr.dsi.unimi.it/LSR/Snippet?id=586 for making 
paragraphs. But that one lacks hyphenation (in this example, hyphenation 
fails in some lines, but thats a xelatex issue) and doesn't look as 
balanced as latex generated output.
And I haven't found a way, to produce two column output with 
markup-lines (did I overlook something?).

So here is what I do:
- create a temporary tex-file from a markup with paper size set with the 
geometry package
- process it with xelatex (from texlive 2009 on ubuntu lucid)
- convert it with pdftops (from texlive 2009 on ubuntu lucid)
- return the eps-stencil

Now this is just a proof of concept, trial or whatever.
Problems for now:
- The paragraph command is able to pagebreak, this include variant isn't 
- right now.
- The height of the resulting text-box has to be found by trial and error.
- Dependency on unrelated software
TBD: error checks

Does anybody has quick answer to the following questions?
- How can I determine the page height in staff-space or cm?
Not lilypond-related, but probably someone knows ;-)
- How can I crop an EPS to the actually visual size

If I have answers to these questions, I could detetermine the page-count 
of the temporary pdf and create <basename>-[1...].eps files and create a 
markup-list-command.

Well, probably one should use lilypond-book, produce the lilypdf and 
include that in another PDF with an external tool or use the snippet 
mentioned above.
But I also thought about using this technique to improve e.g. 
footnote-markups (with hyphenation etc...).

What do you think? Suggestions welcome.
Cheers, Jan-Peter

xetex-include-example.ly
Description: Text Data