Re: lilypond book issues version 2.5.19

[Bernard Hurley]

Mats Bengtsson wrote:

> I don't realize what you would want to add between the staff lines.
> Is it to circumvent some limitations in LilyPond? Otherwise you could
> just as well tell LilyPond to add the information.
> I think both me, Werner and others on the mailing list would find it
> easier to realize why you find it useful if you are a bit more specific.
> 

First, I'm not sure what you mean by "between the staff lines". In the
example I gave, prelude-d.ly is for clarinet and piano. I did not want
to add anything between the clarinet and piano staffs or inside the
piano grandstaff. Lilypond-book renders the first three bars (clarinet
and piano together) in the first eps file, the next three in the next
etc.. If I render the final LaTeX file, the fourth of these eps files is
included at the top of page 2. Although I might guess that this will
happen, neither I, LaTeX or LilyPond can know this in advance note also
that changes both to the LilyPond score _and_ to my original LaTeX file
can change this. Suppose I want to do something specific under the first
system on each page (e.g. in a set of children's piano pieces I might
want a picture of a dog) then I could do it easily if I could insert an
appropriate LaTeX macro _between_ the \includegraphics calls. I could
also include things like cross-references to other pages, bibliographic
references etc.

Its not a matter circumventing any limitations of Lilypond, but of being
able to use the full power of LaTeX. It would not be practical to add
anything to LilyPond itself to get this functionality as using it would
involve (at least) two calls to lilypond. Actually I already have this
functionality (and more) as I call Lilypond from LyX, using a LyX
converter that I am developing and this can do some post-processing on
the file produced by lilypond-book. The code for the converter at the
moment is a bit of a mess and is really only usable by me. I will
release it sometime, but I will probably wait till the next version of
LyX is released as that will change the way converters are handled.
However life would be easier if it could be done with  a macro.

/Bernard