Patch for lilypond-book to support separate titling and indexing in LaTeX

[Michael Haynie]

Greetings;

I've been working on a largish collection of hymns for the last several 
years.  The collection includes lead sheets, piano scoring, and 
orchestral arrangements, and a hymnal.  There are now several thousand 
files in the source base.  As you might imagine, automation is really 
important to my sanity <G>.  To support that, I've modified 
lilypond-book to help me with the construction of the hymnal.  This 
patch allows me to set up titling and indexing in LaTeX (which it does 
very well), while allowing Lilypond to engrave the music.  So: the 
patch makes it possible to automatically construct a fairly elaborate 
hymnal type work, but at the cost of making installation a little more 
difficult.

There don't appear to be viable alternatives to LaTeX for this sort of 
effort, at this time.  For example, XML processors all seem to need 
some clever backend for producing printed matter, which nearly always 
turns out to be some TeX derivative.  DTP packages don't work for my 
purposes because of the need to quickly rearrange the order of music to 
improve pagination (It's bad news to have a song start on an odd page 
and wrap to an even page -- singers then have to flip back and forth.  
It's much better to have songs start on even pages or fit on one page.)


The patch has two parts:  A patch to lilypond-book.py which changes the 
code that lilypond generates to include lilypond systems.  In 
particular, the patch allows one to include only the second and 
subsequent systems, a particular system, or all systems (as before).

Also attached is a collection of LaTeX macros that do the work of 
including the lilypond music systems, optionally constructing a title 
block, and optionally constructing TOC, and a title index.  The means 
for constructing an author index, metrical index, key index, and so on, 
are now also available (but not included).

To be discussed:

LaTeX Macro Handling:

The patch requires lilypond-book users to include the macro file by 
placing the following in the input source file:
    \input lilypondSystemMacros.tex
They must also have that file in the search path for LaTeX.

Would it be better to generate the macros in the source directory and 
automatically generate the input statement?  (I think this might be 
hard to do, but I see that we do something similar with 
\usepackage{graphics}).


Titling:

The lilypond invocation is modified to include '-H all' by default.  
Agreed?


Field Markup:

The patch doesn't handle translation of markup commands from the 
lilypond notations to equivalent LaTeX commands.  On the one hand, 
plain fields makes the indexing task much simpler.  On the other hand, 
copyrights are harder to get right.  I'm willing to consider 
suggestions on ways to approach this type of translation.  One might 
write a translator in scheme, or one might use an external program to 
transform the input.  If one were clever enough, one might even manage 
the translation in LaTeX (shudder :).


Documentation:
I'd be happy to contribute a writeup on using this scheme to either the 
documentation, or the snippet repository.  What would you prefer?  I 
can give detailed instructions on the whole process from arranging the 
pages to to constructing the indexing automatically, to constructing 
the signatures for binding.

Thanks for your consideration.

patch-altbook
Description: Binary data

lilypondSystemMacros.tex
Description: TeX document