Re: Bends

[Carl D. Sorensen]

On 3/23/09 7:07 PM, "Tony Willoughby" <address@hidden> wrote:

> 
> 
> Alright, I'd like to help.  But, like David, I'm pretty much flat out at
> work until the summer.
> 
> I'm a software engineer and am pretty handy with C, perl, assembly,
> bash, expect, sed, awk.  Linux stuff in general.
> 
> It never occurred to me that one could code in "postscript".  So, maybe
> I'm the wrong guy for this job.  Could someone point me to any
> documentation that would describe what would have to be done to
> contribute to lilypond?

No, you're definitely a right guy for this job.  You have two important
prerequisites:

1) You're interested in having a particular feature in LilyPond (this is by
far the most important)
2) You have some background in programming.

You can see the Contributors' Guide for some detailed information about
participating:

<http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.13/Documentation/devel/contrib-guide/index#index
>

My recommendation is that you spend a bit of time getting familiar with
LilyPond.  You should get the source, and hunt around in the source to see
where graphic items (grobs) are created.  The C++ code is fairly hard to
read if you insist on knowing the details, but if you just pretend it works
and don't try to understand exactly how each line works until you need to,
it's not so bad.

Much of the alterable output is in Scheme, so you'll need to understand a
bit about Scheme.  Actually, it's in Guile, which is a specific
implementation of Scheme.  You can find the Guile Reference Manual online:

<http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manual/html_node/index.html>

There's also the book I learned Scheme from available online:

<http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html>

You also will probably need a postscript language reference to understand
how to create the things you want in postscript:

<http://www.adobe.com/devnet/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf>

A simple PostScript tutorial can be found here:

<http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/dataformats/postscript/>

A more complicated, official Adobe PostScript tutorial can be found here:

<http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/offline/PostScript/BLUEBOOK.PDF>

That will probably give you plenty to chew on for now.

When you're ready to get started (i.e. when work slows down) give a shout
and jump in!

Thanks,

Carl