Re: producing "archival" scores

[Stuart Pullinger]

On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 16:40:01 -0400
"Jason Merrill" <address@hidden> wrote:

> So far, the best option was suggested by Tom: a tool called PDFtoMusic
> Pro that converts PDF scores into MusicXML.  The pros are that it is
> available right now, and that it presumably works.  Downsides are that
> it is proprietary and not free, and takes what seems to me a rather
> indirect route towards solving my particular problem.
> 
> Any other suggestions?  Any comments on the likelihood of being able
> to compile lilypond into a music interchange format at some point in
> the future?

One possibiltiy that has not been mentioned yet is to use lilypond's
SVG output instead of PDF. SVG is an open standard developed at the w3c:

http://www.w3c.org/Grapics/SVG/

The pros: since SVG is an open standard and not reliant on one
company to support it, it is, in a sense, more future-proof than PDF.
SVG is an xml dialect and therefore it will be possible to use XSLT to
transform the SVG files into future file formats (although I accept
that this could be time-consuming).

The cons: SVG is not music-aware - it is merely a graphics file. The
files can be edited in a graphics program such as Inkscape
(http://www.inkscape.org) but this is only in a
moving-blobs-and-lines-around-a-screen sense not in a notation editor.
It would be possible to make lilypond's SVG output more music-aware
(and this is an area that I am interested in) but, as far as I know,
there is no svg-based music-aware file format that you could use. You
would therefore still have to archive the .ly files or their MusicXML
equivalents.

SVG are supported in Firefox and Konqueror (in GNU/Linux) but I
understand that support in IE is is poor.

In conclusion: SVG provide an alternative to PDF which may be more
future-proof provided that you are prepared for patchy support in
current browsers.

Stuart