Am 14.02.2013 17:21, schrieb Joseph Rushton Wakeling:
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 ;-)
Sure. But in the context of a professional publishing house, "easy"
isn't the crucial point.
Besides being robust and fully documented, I'd say "maintainability" is
an important issue. And I know that my views on that topic are quite
biased (pro LilyPond) ...
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.
Maybe I'll get in touch with you before. I already intended to present
the outline of the presentation here and ask for feedback - I think it's
an issue that concerns many of us ...
(The presentation is due at the end of April, so it will be some time
still).
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.
From the discussion on this list I assume that there are two very
different 'stages' to this. One is the raw musical content, which seems
to be quite easily converted (I think something like an XSLT-like
transformation of LilyPond's music stream).
If one wants to also export LilyPond's layout qualities it would be much
more intricate because at the time LilyPond makes its layout decisions
that music stream isn't available anymore.
But I think the first option would be perfectly usable (at least in the
context of our discussion) to be able to prepare the score with LilyPond
and give the publisher a working file that he can apply his house style
templates to and finish with his own man-power and knowledge.
Preparing a "manuscript" with LilyPond isn't the way to go because
nowadays many (most) publishers won't pay engraving staff when they also
can get editors doing that work for free. (This actually is the reason I
didn't get a contract for editing a few works for UE).
Best
Urs
_______________________________________________
lilypond-user mailing list
lilypond-user@gnu.org
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
_______________________________________________
lilypond-user mailing list
lilypond-user@gnu.org
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
