Re: Lilypond and ePub

[Nils]

On Fri, 2 Mar 2012 22:38:53 +0100
Nils <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hello list,
> 
> (this is just chatting and dreaming. If you don't want to waste your time 
> with thinking about the future, don't read on, there is no practical 
> information in here.)
> 
> Today I bought my first eBook reader, the kobo touch. I chose this because it 
> is rather cheap and is not a closed ecosystem regarding up- and downloads as 
> well as file formats.
> 
> I tried pdf and epub books now and it is clear that epdf is not a good format 
> for this device. I suspect the same for other readers which are not A4 size 
> or bigger.
> 
> ePub on the other hand scales well to different display sizes. You can choose 
> the font, size etc. Obviously the human layouter has no fine control over 
> line- and pagebreaks here anymore (except forced ones like chapter breaks). 
> Well, maybe this is just the future, I don't see a problem with that, at 
> least not for text.
> 
> Now I'm thinking about music notation on such a device. Obviously they are 
> not made for performance, which is fine. The page turn is a bit slow (but so 
> is a paper pageturn) and the screens are too small for music. But practical 
> solutions are just around the corner for these (using two linked devices for 
> example, or one that has two screens, where one page is turned when you play 
> on the other).
> 
> Anyway, there are more use cases for music notation than piano performance or 
> conductors. Songbooks don't require much space and even in real life they 
> have approx. the same measurements. Or music theory books, you only need 
> snippets here.
> 
> But the different display size remains. You need scaling and dynamic line and 
> pagebreaks here.
> 
> Lilypond-Book came to my mind where the pagebreak gets dynamic through each 
> music-line/system becomes one vector image. You get no/ugly system spacing, 
> but at least dynamic page breaks. 
> 
> The line-break on the other hand is more problematic, although in principle 
> it could be solved in the same manner as page-breaking. This would be a 
> revival of moveable types, the system is divided in columns and they are 
> technically independent as well, so you get dynamic linebreaks.
> Maybe not the most beautiful way, but quick and practical, which are in fact 
> the same reasons it was used from the year 1501 onward.
> 
> Any thoughts on this topic? I immediately found this relevant to my interest, 
> once I saw the staticness and resulting uglyness of PDF compared to the 
> elegance of ePub (for text). I can not imagine music notation as pdf here.
> 
> Nils

Supplemental:
I am sure you heard about musescore and their approach to create a reader 
software for ipads and other mobile devices. I think they are trying to bind it 
to Musescore or some derived software itself, requiering the user to install 
their software. I think this is the wrong approach and an open ebook-format 
which does not need any musical information other than the glyphs and spacing 
is better here. Maybe this is even possible as ePub (or similar) extension.

Nils