Re: Is Lilypond right for me?

[Beton, Richard]

Alexander Basson wrote:

> ...
> I'm wondering -- will Lilypond allow me to combine math and music
> typesetting into a single document?  Can I install and use it on my Mac
> (again, running OS X)?  Do I need a different TeX implementation?
> ...
>  

In an ideal world, you can do this easily using MusicXML, MathML and 
XHTML. These are all flavours of XML and can be combined easily using 
the powerful XML namespace mechanism. However, tools to support this 
combination are essentially non-existent yet.

A related demonstration is available, should you wish to see how 
technology might progress according to the World Wide Web Consortium's 
(W3C) aspirations. Have a look at http://www.w3.org and in particular 
the Amaya browser. If you try Amaya, their startup page shows a 
combination of XHTML, MathML and SVG, a good demonstration of namespace 
integration.

XHTML (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/) is widely supported and is a fully 
usable descendent of HTML.

MathML (http://www.w3.org/Math/) is partially supported - web browsers 
such as Mozilla provide some support. Many mathematical tools are 
evolving to give good support to MathML (e.g. MathCad, Mathematica) so 
it probably has a significant future.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/) is still 
emerging but seems to have a lot of work going on. Again, there are some 
big vendors pushing it (Adobe, Corel etc).

MusicXML (http://www.recordare.com/xml.html), on the other hand, is in 
its infancy. IMHO, is should be an important way forward. However, the 
major software vendors to be grudgingly supporting it and the open 
source community is moderately small. I wish this were not so. Project 
Xemo (http://www.xemo.org) seems to be the major open source MusicXML 
activity and it's only a couple of guys at an early stage in the 
project. One chap is writing a MusicXML to SVG converter to fill the 
gap; this is attempting to reproduce for XML something Lilypond is very 
good at for TeX.

Where does Lilypond fit in? Not at all in an XML framework, but it's a 
very competent music formatter. It has some quirks and a shortage of 
GUIs, but otherwise it is undeniably very good. I expect it will have 
users and developers for some time to come. Are there converters to/from 
MusicXML? I don't know; there should be. In the longer term, TeX will 
give way to XML I think. But if you've tried writing raw XML text, 
you'll already know that XML is only really useful when you have the 
right tools.

I haven't answered the original question, but hopefully raised some 
broader topics.

Rick :-)

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