Re: Sibelius Software UK office shuts down

[address@hidden]

On 2 août 2012, at 18:18, Lucas Gonze wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 8:04 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> More generally than that, I think the reason to discuss is to _discover_ the
>> areas where you can cooperate.  There are obvious areas of interaction --
>> e.g. enabling Lilypond output for MuseScore and ensuring that it gets
>> updated effectively in response to Lilypond syntax changes.
> 
> I have considered using Lilypond as a back end for front end hacking,
> but the compile time from .ly to .svg is way too high.
> 
> Is it architecturally possible to make a significant amount of
> overhead go away? Are incremental compiles plausible?
> 

It is very difficult.  It's better to use a front-end editor that shows some 
sorta mock-up of the score and that only compiles the nice LilyPond version 
from time to time (if this exists).  Getting an actual LilyPond score requires 
calculating line breaks and there's no way to get rid of the overhead.  That 
said, we optimize all the time: I believe that for larger scores w/ many 
staves, the current development version is faster than 2.14.

As for the svg, significant improvement can be made in the speed of LilyPond's 
svg export - contributions are certainly welcome in this area.  The backend is 
very well written but it is all in Scheme and can be quite slow as it does not 
make reference to an external font file but rather draws out every glyph.

Cheers,
MS