Horizontalized scores

[Erik Linde]

Hi, 

I am the creator of Notezilla, a popular (and fairly new) web application that allows users to both listen to classical music, as well as see a scrolling representation of the score that has been synced exactly to the recording. 

A big thing for us is being able to generate horizontal scores, ie scores where there are no line breaks or page breaks. This allows us and our users to enjoy a very constant visual flow of the music without skipping around too much. LilyPond is an integral component for us when it comes to generating these scores, as it is very important to us that the music looks and feels like "real" sheet music - this is one of the primary reasons for why we love LilyPond.

Typically the way we have been generating the images of the sheet music that we use on the website, is by setting some of the layout attributes to really large values, for example: 

ragged-last = ##t

paper-width = 2400.0\cm

paper-height = 50.0\cm

or perhaps 

#(set! paper-alist (cons '("my size" . (cons (* 2000 in) (* 50 in))) paper-alist))

#(set-default-paper-size "my size")

And then generating a pdf, which we then convert to images.

This works very well when generating a simple piece, such as a piano piece, but whenever there are multiple instruments, and when the piece is very long, such as is the case for most symphonies (which happen to be the most popular pieces on Notezilla), the time required to typeset a file seems to increase exponentially with the complexity of the music. 

For a symphony, it could easily go from a few minutes, when using a default layout, such as A4 or letter, to upwards of 10 hours, when using a custom paper format that is extremely wide, for example a 500cm or 1000cm in width. Please feel free to use this link to download the example that illustrates this - Beethoven's 3rd Symphony Mvt. 1. If I try running "lilypond ScoreMvtI.ly" in this example in a default layout, it takes maybe 10-15 minutes or so to typeset. If I uncomment row 27 and 28 (which is where I specify the *huge* paper size), it takes maybe 10 hours...

I am wondering if someone on this mailing list knows of any work-arounds or tricks that I could employ here to shorten the this time? The only requirements for us is that, in the end, that we get one long horizontal score, where the vertical spacing between the staffs is identical throughout the piece. Whatever method we can use to get there would be great to hear about! Maybe one way could be to split up the score into just 3-4 rows instead, and then merge these in Photoshop - my concern with that method would be that the vertical distances between staffs would probably not be identical, which would mean that the horizontal score simply would not work...

I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Thank you very much for all the work that has gone into LilyPond!

Best regards, 

Erik Linde

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Using a Mac Book Pro with 16GB RAM, 2.3GHz i7, Max OS X 10.9.1 + and LilyPond 2.18.0-1