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Re: lay out


From: Mats Bengtsson
Subject: Re: lay out
Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 12:46:27 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511



Aaron Mehl wrote:
continued from preious email that yahoo sent
accidently before I finished :(



If a structural wish list was allowed however here
is
what I would want.

1. A real separation of content and formatting.

       This means that a lilypond file would have no
formatting in it at all. A seperate style sheet would
be the place for this. The advantage is that if you
have style tweaks for multiple docs only one file is
needed to apply these tweaks to all files. This might
require the addition of attributes to permit lower
level styles in and external file...

I would claim that this idea clearly has influenced the design
of LilyPond from the first version. You can set parameters to
determine the layout in the \layout{...} block.
However, there will always be special cases where the automatic
layout decisions taken by the program will not be good enough,
so therefore we can never get rid of the need to tweak certain
parameters at a specific place in the score. This means that
it will be impossible to get a 100% separation of content and
layout.


2. A fixed and clearly defined structure which takes
into account the possible structural pieces that
different scores can contain.

\piece
\movement
\phrase
\motiv
\chorus
etc.

This I know is a fundamental change in the structure
of  lilypond and possibly(probably) hard to impose on
the already existing structure.

The support for titling in LilyPond has always been a bit
primitive, just providing a basic support to add titles to
a piece. So, the structural elements you propose are really
out of scope in todays LilyPond. Up til version 2.2, the titling
layout was really hard coded and it was very seldom that you
could have more than a single \score{...} in a .ly file and
get a useful output. However, from version 2.4 you can
actually redefine how the titling is done, so there are much
better possibilities to actually typeset a full piece with
several movements in a single .ly file. Still, going from that
to what you have in mind is a very long step and I'm not convinced
that it should be top priority. For me it's much more important
that the typesetting withing each movement is top quality.



Truthfully \score etc doesn't say much about the
structure of a composition but are rather containers
for data types to be parsed.

Think of it as one movement of a piece.

This thread was started to understand and I hope
document the file structure.

I would like to see actually a diagram of how and in
what order each block ("container of data") is parsed
in lilypond as well as what block is processed first
second etc.

Parsing is from top to bottom, replacing macro definitions
along the way, so nothing fancy is going on here.

    /Mats




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