Re: MusicXML

[Vaughan McAlley]

On 24 April 2013 05:32, Urs Liska <address@hidden> wrote:
> As David (and Mike) pointed out not everything is included in the music
> stream, so a XSLT conversion won't be completely sufficient (although
> probably a good start and way better than the status quo).
>
> Maybe there would be a way using a (Python?) application that calls
> LilyPond to capture the input stream and at the same time parses the
> input file(s) to get more information from them.
>
> If there is any chance for making progress with that I'm willing to put
> real work in it (as far as my capabilities reach ...).
>
> I think that a Python program might be a good idea:
> - I'm sure there is good XML support with Python (don't really know,
> though)
> - We could surely use code or experience from the musicxml2ly project

If MusicXML becomes an official or de facto standard, MusicXML export
will be an essential feature of any music notation program that wants
to be taken seriously. From my experience converting several of my old
Finale scores to Lilypond, I would say that page formatting (as
excellently as Lilypond does that) should be a low priority. A
publishing house that accepts XML will inevitably need to clean it up
and will most likely want to do the page formatting in their own
program.

I think that any music export/import without significant cleaning up
is still a way away, so the priority as far as MusicXML export should
be a good representation of “just the notes” (what is inside a bar).
This would also be relatively easy to derive from Lilypond source.

> - We could probably also use code and ideas from Frescobaldi.

As far as I can tell, Frescobaldi seems to keep a very strong internal
representation of Lilypond source for its own purposes, which could be
worth utilizing.

Vaughan