Re: SVG output sponsorship

[Erik Sandberg]

On Sunday 12 August 2007, Vivian Barty-Taylor wrote:
> It seems to me that having reliable (bug-free) SVG output would be a
> big plus for Lilypond. At the present  time, I have been unable to fix
> all the font problems (not sure whether this is Lilypond or Inkscape
> which is giving me trouble.) To get to where I am at I had to make a
> lot of changes by hand to the SVG file which is tedious. (Specifically,
> the italic sans-serif fonts still don't work.)
>
> The main advantage of the SVG output (I would suggest) is that small
> changes to positions of objects can be done in a WYSIWYG environment,
> instead of the current estimate-how-much-I-have-to-move-that-object/
> add line of code/ re-process score/ find out I haven't moved it enough/
> moved it too much/ change values of #'padding or #'extra-offset etc.
> etc. all of which is time consuming especially with big projects.

This approach has a problem: Once you change a note (say, fix a typo) and need 
to re-run lilypond, you will have to redo all tweaks again.

You may want to take a look at the experimental gnome back-end, which has 
existed for quite some time now (2.4 or 2.6, IIRC), but which for some reason 
never became popular. It offers a better solution to your problem: The score 
is displayed on the screen, and you can adjust spacing by drag-and drop, and 
save all modifications in a separate file (containing tweaks). This way you 
can still make musical corrections in the .ly file without having to redo all 
spacing tweaks (except, of course, if your musical corrections themselves 
affect spacing sufficiently to invalidate your tweaks).

Erik