7 ms·

It's a shame they won't make the typesetting engine available as a library so that a (real) graphical interface could be written for it.

by ssp 16y ago

ptomato 16y ago
It's open source. Knock yourself out.
- ssp 16y ago
  When I looked at doing that many years ago, their attitude was that splitting it into a library was not a useful thing to do and that everybody should be editing text files.
  - ptomato 16y ago
    So prove them wrong.
    - ssp 16y ago
      I can't maintain a fork of lilypond.
      - ptomato 16y ago
        Well, don't complain then that they don't think your idea is a good idea and aren't going to spend their time (which nobody is paying them for) implementing it.
        three14 16y ago
        There's a huge difference between having to maintain a fork and just writing the extra features you want. No one has the right to insist that other people spend the time the way you want them to, but you can certainly complain about their choices being shortsighted.
  - alextp 16y ago
    Another problem is that lilypond is slow, and any WYSIWYG interface to it would either bypass the compiler to show a "preview" of the score or would have a horrible lag whenever the user edited something. This might not be obvious, but adding or removing (or even changing the pitch/duration of) a single note can potentially lead to a solution with completely different appearance (after all it's a dynamic programming algorithm that lays things out, considering all sorts of "badness" in the style of tex). If you remove this specificity for some greedy techniques, then it will no longer have lilypond's quality.
    - BrandonM 16y ago
      The performance would depend on how you interface with the library. I envision a setup where the entire piece is first written using a nice interface, that frontend then generates the text file that is passed to Lilypond, Lilypond does its magic (one time!), and then the user has an opportunity to make minor tweaks to the layout or start the cycle anew to fix mistakes.
  - moultano 16y ago
    I really wish I could just pipe finale files to it and have lilypond make it not suck.
    - thefool 16y ago
      why is this not possible? Have the program read the "notes" from the finale file, format them into the lillypad format, and have its compiler spit the beautified version back out to you. This would be the equivilent of building a "quick preview gui" for lillypad.
      - ramses0 16y ago
        The point here is that grouping matters moreso than a simple stream of notes. If you just grab the notes as a stream (this is what happened to me the first time I used lilypond) you lose some of the control over what is considered voices. http://www.robertames.com/blog.cgi/entries/nexus-of-etude.html http://www.robertames.com/blog.cgi/entries/nexus-of-etude.ht... http://www.robertames.com/files/nexus-of-etude/etude.ly http://www.robertames.com/files/nexus-of-etude/etude.ly My mistake that I realize now is that I should have used a concept of "voices" to strictly separate the melody from the bass-line. See here as a contrast from somebody who is muuuuch better at lilypond than me and didn't start with a gui frontend. http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ftp/GiulianiM/O1/Etude4/Etude4.ly http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ftp/GiulianiM/O1/Etude4/Etude4... Relevant section is: \score { { << \new Staff = "giuliani-opus1" << \global \new Voice = "voix1" { \soprano } \new Voice = "voix2" { \basse } >> >> } Compared to my amateur: \score { << \VoiceI >> ...so the stream of notes is ~lossy~ compared to musically knowing that you're layering a repeating melody on top of a bass-line, or occasionally punctuating a melody with chords.
  - timclark 16y ago
    Some people, like me for example, find it easier to edit the text files than to muck about with a mouse in a graphical editor, selecting or failing to select the note, selecting the note duration from a pallet or menu, seems to take forever - in Lilypond I would just type c4 d2 e4 and I am done. JEdit provides a good preview mode and integration if you require it. However, the Lilypond input syntax could be improved a great deal - I don't think the multiple different types of braces used in syntax files should be necessary for example.
augustl 16y ago
I would like to see the usable GUI supporting all semantics from the text interface. Writing Lilypond notation compares to writing software, and we all know why programming is largely done with text and not with GUIs.

It's a shame they won't make the typesetting engine available as a library so that a (real) graphical interface could be written for it.

by ssp 16y ago

It's a shame they won't make the typesetting engine available as a library so that a (real) graphical interface could be written for it.

ptomato 16y ago

It's open source. Knock yourself out.

ssp 16y ago
When I looked at doing that many years ago, their attitude was that splitting it into a library was not a useful thing to do and that everybody should be editing text files.
- ptomato 16y ago
  So prove them wrong.
  - ssp 16y ago
    I can't maintain a fork of lilypond.
    - ptomato 16y ago
      Well, don't complain then that they don't think your idea is a good idea and aren't going to spend their time (which nobody is paying them for) implementing it.
      - three14 16y ago
        There's a huge difference between having to maintain a fork and just writing the extra features you want. No one has the right to insist that other people spend the time the way you want them to, but you can certainly complain about their choices being shortsighted.
- alextp 16y ago
  Another problem is that lilypond is slow, and any WYSIWYG interface to it would either bypass the compiler to show a "preview" of the score or would have a horrible lag whenever the user edited something. This might not be obvious, but adding or removing (or even changing the pitch/duration of) a single note can potentially lead to a solution with completely different appearance (after all it's a dynamic programming algorithm that lays things out, considering all sorts of "badness" in the style of tex). If you remove this specificity for some greedy techniques, then it will no longer have lilypond's quality.
  - BrandonM 16y ago
    The performance would depend on how you interface with the library. I envision a setup where the entire piece is first written using a nice interface, that frontend then generates the text file that is passed to Lilypond, Lilypond does its magic (one time!), and then the user has an opportunity to make minor tweaks to the layout or start the cycle anew to fix mistakes.
- moultano 16y ago
  I really wish I could just pipe finale files to it and have lilypond make it not suck.
  - thefool 16y ago
    why is this not possible? Have the program read the "notes" from the finale file, format them into the lillypad format, and have its compiler spit the beautified version back out to you. This would be the equivilent of building a "quick preview gui" for lillypad.
    - ramses0 16y ago
      The point here is that grouping matters moreso than a simple stream of notes. If you just grab the notes as a stream (this is what happened to me the first time I used lilypond) you lose some of the control over what is considered voices. http://www.robertames.com/blog.cgi/entries/nexus-of-etude.html http://www.robertames.com/blog.cgi/entries/nexus-of-etude.ht... http://www.robertames.com/files/nexus-of-etude/etude.ly http://www.robertames.com/files/nexus-of-etude/etude.ly My mistake that I realize now is that I should have used a concept of "voices" to strictly separate the melody from the bass-line. See here as a contrast from somebody who is muuuuch better at lilypond than me and didn't start with a gui frontend. http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ftp/GiulianiM/O1/Etude4/Etude4.ly http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ftp/GiulianiM/O1/Etude4/Etude4... Relevant section is: \score { { << \new Staff = "giuliani-opus1" << \global \new Voice = "voix1" { \soprano } \new Voice = "voix2" { \basse } >> >> } Compared to my amateur: \score { << \VoiceI >> ...so the stream of notes is ~lossy~ compared to musically knowing that you're layering a repeating melody on top of a bass-line, or occasionally punctuating a melody with chords.
- timclark 16y ago
  Some people, like me for example, find it easier to edit the text files than to muck about with a mouse in a graphical editor, selecting or failing to select the note, selecting the note duration from a pallet or menu, seems to take forever - in Lilypond I would just type c4 d2 e4 and I am done. JEdit provides a good preview mode and integration if you require it. However, the Lilypond input syntax could be improved a great deal - I don't think the multiple different types of braces used in syntax files should be necessary for example.

augustl 16y ago

I would like to see the usable GUI supporting all semantics from the text interface. Writing Lilypond notation compares to writing software, and we all know why programming is largely done with text and not with GUIs.