Re: Using Lilypond with OpenOffice?

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Ray Peck <address@hidden> writes:

> I've used EPS in the past, but always found it to be slow and buggy.
> Perhaps this is no longer true?

EPS is just PostScript without page definitions and a trailing
showpage.  It's never been slow or buggy, but possibly you've used/had
to use slow or buggy software.

> I also am hoping for a simple workflow more along the lines of copy
> and paste than "render and import".  I also would like to have a
> single source document if at all possible.  In OO, as in Word,
> the images can all live in the text document, and can be edited
> from there.

ie, a procedure that can't be automated, nor checked, and with no
chance of recovery when (not if) the word processor fails.  The
horror...

>>The obvious question is: have you considered using LaTeX, instead of a
>>beast such as openoffice.  Talking about overkill...  
>
> I haven't seriously considered this for several reasons:

[snip]

Then I don't think you'll find much help here, but I could be wrong.

>>There's a preliminary svg backend that can be used by sodipodi.
>
> This doesn't parse for me (yet).

Sodipodi is a drawing program that uses svg files.

> Can you define "needs some work" a bit more clearly?  What shape
> is it in?

Font selection is non-standard and fragile, you can only use one font
size yet, there are small problems with beams and slurs, brackets and
other things have not been implemented yet.  Unless you can put some
effort into it, it's not really an option yet.

> Can it generate SVG that the Adobe reader (for example)
> can render correctly?

Adobe reader is not free software; I couldn't care less.  It might
well read the file, but you'll most probably have to figure out how
the program selects and locates fonts.  If you find a good solution,
we'll have to see if we can integrate it.

> The notation fragments that I'm going to be working on are modest:
> a line or two of grand staff, simple rhythms, few markup symbols.
> I don't need to be able to generate complex scores.

Even so, you may have to work on the svg output, EPS is probably the
way to go.

Greetings,
Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org