Re: LilyPond frontend once again

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi,

On Sat, 16 Oct 2004, Matevz Jekovec wrote:

> Looking at Five Line Skink (http://s92972807.onlinehome.us/skink.html)
> ABC Music frontend, does LilyPond have anything similar? I'm not
> thinking on another music notation program now (I think LilyPond should
> really do its primary goal - being an engraver), but something similar
> to WYSIWYG. IMO RoseGarden, NoteEdit and similar should serve as a
> composing tool (when you write a score on your own, you don't really
> care how does it look like. You're interested in its internal
> structure), but they all have the export to LilyPond function.

RoseGarden and NoteEdit indeed do the job you want.

> That's where the LilyPond GUI should take part. You'd open that .ly file
> and prepare the score for publishing.

And this is where it stops. The syntax of .ly files is much too complex to
make this easy. The whole purpose of that complex syntax was to make it
unnecessary to use a graphical tool.

So, writing such a beast is difficult enough. And then - as you found
out the hard way - the syntax of .ly files is changing so often that
maintaining that beast would be no fun.

Anyway, the next best thing I can recommend is jEdit with lily4jedit,
which comes with a dvi viewer (clickable: click on the note to jump to
the corresponding position in the text) and a midi player.

Ciao,
Dscho

P.S. Of course you can use vi or emacs, too, but I am a little bit
involved in the development of lily4jedit (Berti does all the work), so I
could not pass on that opportunity to advertise...