Martin Tarenskeen wrote:
There is a parallel with LaTeX vs. GUI wordprocessors like Word or
OpenOffice.org. These are two different worlds, but somewhere inbetween
there is LyX. I kind of like the LyX approach.
I like it too. it's real WYSIWYM. But some LyX users (and even developers)
think it is (and should be) a "almost-WYSIWYG editor". In my opinion this
would be a great error. LyX should never show pages and so on, just the
meaning of the doc, and this is the revolutionary potential of LyX that even
some developers IMHO didn't catch.
A similar approach to Lily (and notational music) is quite hard to achieve,
because music notation is quite a different thing than text. I mean: you
perhaps can't avoid some heavy WYSIWYG and thus a Finale approach.
But 1st one should ask himself "what do users need?" The 1st answer, I
think, is "fast, exact music writing with clear meaning/structure
representation and inmediate feed-back (better if visual and also audio)".
In my opinion, this could be partially achieved in close future with a
jEdit/lilypondtool-like editor with a sort of live-lilypond encoder which
shows in almost real-time changes in the pdf or in other way. This could be
achieved by a new ultra light "ugly" modality of Lily which doesn't care
about aesthetics, lines and pages, just to show visual feedback of MUSIC and
perhaps its logic/structure, not his final "form". But still I would mainly
use a text editor like excellent jEdit.
I don't know too much WYSIWYG editors for Lilypond (just tried Denemo) but I
don't like them too much: IMHO they're very far from the LyX concept and
perhaps always will be.
The most important problem is that with every which one approach, it is hard
to save one of Lilypond most important quality: the ability to use variables
and to build music using its own internal logic. This is something that in
text you don't need because strong and continuous internal reference and
simmetry is a characteristic of music, not of text. Thus, the simpleness of
LyX is ok, but I can't think about a "LiLyXpond" in any shape. LyX can
graphically show the 99% of LaTeX code. A software able to graphically show
the internals of a Lilypond logically structured file is almost difficoult
to imagine, not mention to develop.
-----
Piero Faustini, PhD student
Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche
Sezione musicologia
Università di Ferrara
Main Software used:
- LyX 1.6.1 on WinXP sp3; EndNote & JabRef
- MikTex
- LaTeX class: Koma book
- Lilypond 2.12 for example excerpts
- BibLaTeX for bibliographies