On 02/14/2013 04:44 PM, Urs Liska wrote:
While it may not seem to be intuitive you can actually write extremely robust "house style" sheets (or rather libraries which I find much more reliable than any preset templates or whatever you could use with WYSIWYG software. With the additional advantage that you can (quite) easily apply changes to that style sheet to existing scores.
I'm sure that's true. There's a difference between robustness/reliability and "easy", though ;-)
One thing that could be stressed as a "selling point" towards publishers is the "diffability" of Lilypond sources. I find it extremely interesting to have the possibility of git-driven editing/publishing work-flows. Last year I had communication with a Henle official who told me that they have a very fixed work-flow which consists of a) the editor preparing his edition (in whatever form), b) Henle preparing the engraving according to their standards, and c) no less than six proof-reading cycles. I think such a work-flow could profit extremely by a scenario where all involved people work on the same codebase - the editor preparing the score with LilyPond, the engraver beautifying directly in this codebase, and all proof-readers having access to that too. I will soon pick up on that communication, and then I'll surely raise the engraving issue, showing them some of my 'raw' scores, Janek's beautiful final versions and maybe some exemplary git commits. I don't expect this to have immediate impact, but who knows ... I will also prepare a presentation on 'plain text based work-flows for writing (about) music' that I will do at my university, and I intend to also present this personally to a few people occupied in scholarly editions. Such collaborative approaches are perfectly suited for git-based work. It would be good to get the attention of such institutions, as they might have some influence on publishers' decisions (although I know that this influence is actually quite small ...).
Funnily enough I had very similar thoughts about this (I had a discussion with Valentin along these lines some years ago as well as some people in the scholarly music community). My focus was very much on things like Urtext editions, and it was part of a broader set of thoughts about scholarly communication.
Do let me have a copy of your presentation -- I'd like to cite it in some work that I'm preparing on these kinds of issues.
In the meantime I repeat that it would be a very valuable thing to be able to export the (raw) music of a LilyPond score to MusicXML. Maybe I wouldn't have decided so easily to switch to LaTeX if I hadn't known about the possibility to export my documents to word processor formats. For example I think it would be easier to convince academics that it is a good idea to prepare an edition (collaboratively) using LilyPond and git if they know that they can still export the result to a publisher who insists on Finale/Sibelius.
I'm not familiar enough with MusicXML to understand: how much potential is there for lossy changes in the conversion process?
I ask because my honest feeling is that unless the conversion is guaranteed to be rock-solid, you're probably better off using Lilypond to prepare a "manuscript" master copy which is then re-set by the publisher's engraving staff using whatever methods they like. The unfortunate side of that is that it loses the possibility for diff-based corrections and updates to the edition.
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