On Sep 28, 2011, at 5:31 PM, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
>
>> It would be awesome if LilyPond had many of the functionalities of
>> LaTeX, but it'd be a pity if we spent developer time implementing a
>> host of LaTeX-like functionality from scratch when LaTeX already
>> exists.
>
> Well, we don't want to imitate LaTeX, but naturally the same problem
> appears, namely how to enter special characters conveniently.
> Theoretically, none of the proposed commands are necessary since for
> all of them you could use Unicode characters:
>
> \" U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE (ZWSP)
>
> \| U+200C ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER (ZWNJ)
>
> \~ U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER (ZWJ)
> + U+0020 SPACE
> + U+200D ZERO WIDTH JOINER
>
True - my question was more oriented to LaTeX input syntax. That is, if our
goal is to use LaTeX(ish) syntax as much as possible, it'd be great if there
were already open source parsers of LaTeX (or LaTeX like) text that could feed
it into Pango or what have you.
>> My question still stands: are there any libraries that exist that
>> handle this sorta thing (i.e. is to typesetting text what pango is
>> to font)?
>
> I think we should concentrate on using Pango, which also comes with
> layout support (probably rather simple, I don't know). If
> improvements are necessary, we should ask the Pango team to provide
> it.
http://developer.gnome.org/pango/stable/pango-Layout-Objects.html
http://developer.gnome.org/pango/stable/pango-Vertical-Text.html
>
> For hyphenation, there exists the libhyphen library (used e.g. in
> OpenOffice).
>
http://packages.debian.org/fr/sid/libhyphen-dev
> luatex also allows paragraph building using its programmable lua
> interface, but any dependency on TeX-like software means dependency on
> TeXLive or an equivalent TeX distribution...
>
From the luatex website: "The sources may or may not compile, depending on the
third digit after the comma of the local temperature in Dordrecht, Schwetzingen
or Hasselt."
It seems like Pango and libhyphen are good ways to go. A lot of our
home-brewed algorithms can be retired for their more robust ones (unless the
LilyPond text engine beats Pango, which is of course possible but I'd have to
look into it).
Bertrand, as you're the one leading the charge for this, perhaps you could hold
off until the coding par-tay!!1 ? It'll save you the trouble of maintaining
your own hyphenation package.
Cheers,
MS
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