Hello list, (this is just chatting and dreaming. If you don't want to waste your time with thinking about the future, don't read on, there is no practical information in here.)
Today I bought my first eBook reader, the kobo touch. I chose this because it is rather cheap and is not a closed ecosystem regarding up- and downloads as well as file formats. I tried pdf and epub books now and it is clear that epdf is not a good format for this device. I suspect the same for other readers which are not A4 size or bigger. ePub on the other hand scales well to different display sizes. You can choose the font, size etc. Obviously the human layouter has no fine control over line- and pagebreaks here anymore (except forced ones like chapter breaks). Well, maybe this is just the future, I don't see a problem with that, at least not for text. Now I'm thinking about music notation on such a device. Obviously they are not made for performance, which is fine. The page turn is a bit slow (but so is a paper pageturn) and the screens are too small for music. But practical solutions are just around the corner for these (using two linked devices for example, or one that has two screens, where one page is turned when you play on the other). Anyway, there are more use cases for music notation than piano performance or conductors. Songbooks don't require much space and even in real life they have approx. the same measurements. Or music theory books, you only need snippets here. But the different display size remains. You need scaling and dynamic line and pagebreaks here. Lilypond-Book came to my mind where the pagebreak gets dynamic through each music-line/system becomes one vector image. You get no/ugly system spacing, but at least dynamic page breaks. The line-break on the other hand is more problematic, although in principle it could be solved in the same manner as page-breaking. This would be a revival of moveable types, the system is divided in columns and they are technically independent as well, so you get dynamic linebreaks. Maybe not the most beautiful way, but quick and practical, which are in fact the same reasons it was used from the year 1501 onward. Any thoughts on this topic? I immediately found this relevant to my interest, once I saw the staticness and resulting uglyness of PDF compared to the elegance of ePub (for text). I can not imagine music notation as pdf here. Nils _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
