Re: Discussion: automatic engraving and single-source publishing

[David Kastrup]

Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi,
>
> recently I wrote that LilyPond input files - being plain text - are a
> quite natural choice for single-source or cross-media publishing.
> However, I'm not so sure anymore that this is really true (yet).
>
> When finishing a LilyPond score to publication quality there is quite
> a lot of tweaking involved - as you can see from Janek's recent posts
> on lilypondblog.org. And this tweaking makes the engraving very
> specific, actually it's only valid for a specific page layout and even
> a specific LilyPond version. Using the same score in a different
> context will now involve quite some hassles: clever versioning
> strategies, complicated tagging or plain rewriting.
> Each of these solutions is more or less impractical, and I think they
> are far away from real cross-media publishing.

That's to be expected.  When tweaking becomes a regular part of the
typesetting process, the advantages of a content-focused system over
WYWISYG are non-existent.  Actually, the balance is likely going to be
negative since WYSIWYG systems _specialize_ on tweaking.

You are doing manually what LilyPond is bad at, and that works contrary
to its design.  The ultimate solution, of course, is to make LilyPond
better, but of course this is less plannable and has less direct and
visible progress than fixing every slur manually.

Of course, that is sobering: if it takes more time to get from
LilyPond's 95% initial typesetting quality to the 99% quality one wants
for publishing than it takes for some WYSIWYG's initial 80%, then we
have a problem.

And yes, it is a problem if sticking with the 95% is not an option.

> If I want a score to be working in a printed book and in a beamer
> presentation, if I want to reformat the score on a display on the
> music stand depending on user's choice of cue notes or let it reflow
> depending on screen resolution etc. I think we'd need really automatic
> engraving, as LilyPond actually advertises already.

> At least to an extent where there are no tweaks necessary for the
> quality demands at hand.

Sure.  For that reason, I consider much of the time spent on tweaking
and tweaking tools a waste of lifetime better spent on trying to get the
automatisms right.  Of course, that option is harder and requires
different resources.  But it only needs to be done once.

-- 
David Kastrup