Google Summer of Code projects 2016

[Urs Liska]

Hi all,

I'm happy to be able to announce that LilyPond will have two students
working for us as part of the Google Summer of Code program 2016. We had
a busy time and quite some organization to do but now it's ready, and
it's good that we did arrive at having two slots, two students and two
mentors.

Nathan Chou will work on removing a longstanding and annoying limitation
in LilyPond's input capabilities: the fact that spanners are restricted
to start and end in the same voice. While it may have been considered as
semantically straightforward that a crescendo is tied to a dedicated
voice this doesn't reflect the musical reality for many polyphonic
instruments. While a piano *may* feature strict polyphonic setting it
doesn't *have* to, therefore we often see dynamics, slurs/ties, text
spanners and many more ending in different voices.
The workaround that is necessary so far involves adding a hidden voice
just for the spanners, and this workaround is equally tedious/error
prone as semantically wrong. So successfully removing this limitation
will be a significant improvement for a signficant part of the
repertoire engraved with LilyPond. And while it hasn't fully been
considered yet it can be expected that this improvement will have
significant impact on working with partcombined voices as well.
This project is mentored by Jan-Peter Voigt.

Jeffery Shivers will bring the ScholarLY package to production state.
ScholarLY is a package within openLilyLib that enables inserting
annotations in the LilyPond input, which can then be exported to, say,
LaTeX input files to be typeset as critical reports. The annotations
have also proven extremely useful for documenting editorial issues and
communicating them between (human) editors.
The goals are a) to significantly extend the interface for entering
annotations and enable (to name just the most important) inserting music
examples in annotations, trigger the creation of footnotes and have an
annotation cause visual indications in the resulting score (e.g.:
editorial addition => dashed slur/parenthesized articulation etc.). b)
creating these editorial commands that can be triggered by annotations
(or used directly) and c) the creation and publication of a robust LaTeX
package for typesetting reports from data provided from within LilyPond
scores.
This project will be mentored by me.

We welcome the two students and wish them successful and fruitful
projects. They are encouraged to actively reach out to the community,
and so the community is encouraged to welcome them heartily and provide
any support they might need.

Best wishes
Urs