Re: Serious feedback and improvement headroom

[Francisco Vila]

2014-04-11 14:52 GMT+02:00 Jan-Peter Voigt <address@hidden>:
> Yes, but lilypond is a text-based commandline tool that can easily be used
> with frescobaldi. So I would say, it's a good thing, if there are ways to
> make communication between lily and frescobaldi easier to achieve cool
> things. But the graphical part is still on frescobaldis side - and should
> stay there. IMO lily should stay as silly as possible regarding this matter,
> because otherwise we might complicate things. And if frescobaldi can provide
> such a thing, thats great, *but* its a frescobaldi issue, *not* a lilypond
> issue. I say that, because we might modify things in lilypond to make this
> possible in frescobaldi, but making it worse for other frontends.

This and other previous ideas make me remember that the LilyPondTool,
the jEdit plugin, had a ruler tool that solved one of the impossible
problems of text-based input: visual interactivity.

It wasn't as useful as it should because a large dialog appeared and
you had to check the docs anyway and take many decisions, and thus it
was error-prone, cumbersome and awkward to use (and more adjectives
alike if I knew them). That said, it still worked well if you were
very experienced.

This is how it was used: you placed the text cursor right where an
override command should go. Then you could move a grob in the PDF
preview with your mouse and hit OK, and the complete command was
pasted in the code, provided that you set all settings correctly.

I think that the right context and cursor coordinates could be chosen
automatically, and this would become a _very_ useful tool that filled
one of the few holes our workflow has. It served perfectly for bezier
control coordinates of slurs, too.

I think this all falls on the Frescobaldi side. I like LP text based
with the almost infinite power of code, easily writable and highly
readable (although some of the most complex scores are nearly
"write-only"). Open format, human readable scores _and_ beautiful
default results are a dream come true for me. My 2 euro cents.
-- 
Francisco Vila. Badajoz (Spain)
www.paconet.org , www.csmbadajoz.com