Starting off a new community book project

[Urs Liska]

Hello fellow LilyPonders,

recently Federico raised my attention by pointing out the release of a
new book on "Mastering MuseScore". After some discussion, consideration
and poking around I decided to lay the foundation for a new community
book about a) LilyPond and b) the "plain text" complex with LilyPond,
LaTeX and Git.

Actually it's not a new idea but one that was already in the back of my
mind when I started the "openLilyLib tutorials" and the respective type
of posts on Scores of Beauty. There always was the wish to gather this
sort of information to a more or less coherent entity like a book.

So what I have by now is not "presentable" but it's in a state that I
can (and have to) announce it in the form of a "call for contribution".

The idea of the "book" is to focus on those topics that the mailing list
reveals to be regular stumbling blocks for new (or sometimes also
seasoned) users. We want to assist them by gently going into great depth
where the official documentation has to remain concise and
reference-like. What I'm most interested in personally is that step from
the needs of occasional or regular users to the more involved but also
more exciting things, talking about aspects like getting into the spirit
of using Scheme, or best practice suggestions to organize larger projects.

For quite some time this "book" will have more empty than written pages,
and it doesn't have to aim at becoming a coherent "textbook". But I hope
that we may achieve something that is comprehensive in the sense that it
helps people diving more deeply in the LilyPond world.

The book is authored in Markdown using GitBook
(https://github.com/GitbookIO/gitbook), a Node.js application that
builds the book as a statically served HTML site.
The official URL (where you can already have a first glimpse) is
http://book.openlilylib.org, and the development repository is at
https://git.ursliska.de/openlilylib/book.
There is another location where unmerged branches will be automatically
built to when pushed, for example
http://bookbranches.openlilylib.org/scheme-tutorials.
It will be possible to edit the pages online or locally, with the local
way being somewhat more flexible but requiring the installation of a few
tools and dependencies.

Now I'm asking for contribution in several fields:
1)
Improving the infrastructure and appearance. The most urgent issue is
adding a CSS stylesheet for the table of contents. The regular TOC is
always expanded, and it is clear that the TOC of that book will soon
become inacceptably long. So we need a foldable/expandable navigation
bar where initially most items are folded.
Probably there's room for other improvments in the styling of the book,
but that's not that urgent.
There are other things on the functionality side where I'd be happy not
to be alone with. These would involve some Node.js, Python and bash
programming.

2)
General discussion about potential contents, i.e. working on the outline
of un-written chapters

3)
Content contribution. One thing that might be attractive to start with
is integrating existing posts from Scores of Beauty. This may be trivial
in some cases, in other cases one has to do significant rearrangements.

As development and deployment take place on my personal server I can't
fully open up the access, which means that anyone who wants to
contribute has to ask me explicitly for an account.

Best wishes
Urs

-- 
Urs Liska
www.openlilylib.org