Re: calling all opera/musical engravers

[Mike Solomon]

On Dec 16, 2013, at 11:59 PM, Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hello all!
> 
> I would love to hear from anyone who has engraved a full opera or musical 
> (with at least vocal score plus full score) in Lilypond.
> 
> Specifically:
> 1. Is lilypond-book the only sane way to do it?

I don’t use LilyPond book for my stage works - just the prefaces.

> 2. What functions/extensions/tricks did you use to bend Lily to your will?

Lots - nothing unanswerable by this list if you have questions.

> 3. What pitfalls are to be watched for (and hopefully avoided)?

Make sure to separate out content and layout info as much as possible.

> 4. What limitations cannot [currently] be overcome?

I have a piece where several characters are singing in different 
time-signatures freely and they switch at certain cues.  It requires floating 
bits of music to appear all over the page, and LilyPond is not really designed 
for that.  I wound up typesetting the individual bits and importing them into 
inkscape for the layout.  This type of layout is not crazy enough to warrant 
doing outside of LilyPond - there should be a way to line up floating staves 
based on anchors.  There are lots of ways to go about this, but the one I’m 
most excited about would be making markups more object oriented and then 
creating spacing engines that line up markups based on anchors.

Cheers,
MS