producing "archival" scores

[Jason Merrill]

I'm wondering to what extent lilypond files can be considered
"archival," and if there is a good workflow for producing archival
documents using lilypond.  By this, I mean that now that I've taken
the effort of copying a score into the computer, I'd like to save
everyone in the future from making the same effort, and also allow
them easiest access to a form of the score that provides them the
greatest possible utility.

PDF files are certainly good for looking at and printing, and
practically everyone is set up to use them.  However, you can't really
edit them directly.  Providing access to the .ly file also seems
pretty good.  It's "easy" to edit, and open source so there's no
vendor lock in and all that.  The problem is that I'm not sure I could
convince some of my less technically oriented friends to use lilypond.
Even after I tell them how much faster it is for me to type stuff in
than it is to mess around with a mouse and finale, and how it's free
and how I love it, I have a feeling the first time they see a compiler
error because of a misplaced comma they are going to give up.  This
isn't a criticism of lilypond exactly--lilypond is aimed at a
particular group of users and I think it serves them extremely well.
Nonetheless, its steep learning curve makes me wary of considering it
archival.

So what other choices are there?  Proprietary formats are out of the
question because they're, well, proprietary.  That pretty much leaves
MusicXML, as far as I know, which benefits from being readable by any
program my less technically oriented friends are likely to use.  As
far as I can tell, however, there's no way to get lilypond files into
MusicXML format.

Say in a few years some program that is vastly superior to lilypond
comes along, and it's so good that no one wants to use lilypond
anymore.  Unless I can get my lilypond files into that new program,
they're not so useful anymore.  It seems more likely that this
hypothetical new system will allow me to import MusicXML than to
import .ly files.  Is there any work being done on a system that
allows lilypond to compile to MusicXML (or some other good technology
I don't know about) instead of PDF ?  From what I understand, the
makers of Lilypond don't think very highly of MusicXML.

I'd appreciate any thoughts on this problem.  Am I wrong in thinking
that lilypond files aren't really archival?  Is there some solution I
haven't thought of?

Regards,

Jason Merrill