3 ms·
A while back I built a music publishing company (long defunct) and used LilyPond to engrave all of our scores. I received comments from quite a few established
by organsnyder 3y ago
A while back I built a music publishing company (long defunct) and used LilyPond to engrave all of our scores. I received comments from quite a few established composers that the engraving was the best they'd seen from any publisher.
I ended up with a collection of macros I used for common tasks. Probably the most-used was a macro that manually overrode the positioning of an element to be more visually pleasing or less confusing. Of course, it could be argued that the need for this indicates a deficiency of the engraving engine (and this was sometimes the case), but a manual final pass makes the difference between functional and professional-looking results. LilyPond's markup language made this easy.
LilyPond's test suite taught me the value of comprehensive test-driven development: every bug starts as an addition to the test suite, and a visual diff—including a numerical value indicating the amount of change—is taken of the entire suite in between versions. In this way, regressions are quickly identified.
- jchmbrln 3y agoI'd love to see your macros if you have them online somewhere. I've lately started spending lots of time notating music in LilyPond and am seeing the need to build tooling along the way. I started a personal folk song collection using ABC notation. For simple tunes ABC is fantastic, but now that I'm doing more choral/four-part works, I'm reaching for the more powerful tool. Yet there seems to be a huge gap between ABC (simple things done simply and in one way) and LilyPond (do literally anything you want following any format you want, dropping into Scheme as necessary). Ease-of-use/quality-of-life tooling to fill that gap is appealing. P.S. I'd also love to hear the story of your music publishing venture. It sounds intriguing!