Re: Sibelius Software UK office shuts down

[David Kastrup]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> writes:

> Han-Wen Nienhuys writes:
>
>> Architecturally it is very difficult. Rather than making lilypond much
>> more complicated to do incremental rendering, why not invert the
>> problem: have your editor control line breaks, and use lilypond to
>> render just one line of music at a time.
>
> This is exactly what Schikkers-List v0.0.3 does, as an obvious and
> simple extention to the Ikebana prototype.
>
> I'm now working on a new data structure which detaches rendering action
> from the internal music structure.  That should enable using different
> threads in the GUI for managing GUI updates and talking to the lilypond
> server.  Which in turn will enable using parallel lilypond processes to
> do bits of rendering.

I'll point at an old paper of mine here regarding various WYSIWYG
techniques in the LaTeX editing world:
<URL:http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb23-1/kastrup.pdf>.

It would probably be reasonably straightforward to get a
preview-latex-like operation for LilyPond-book which certainly would
make writing LilyPond documentation quite more pleasant (and shortcut
the horrible turnaround times for documentation compiles).  In contrast
to the original preview-latex problem, LilyPond-book snippets are
independent and well-defined (rather than arbitrary document elements).

But LilyPond-book is a special case with highlighted, interspersed music
snippets.  Good for musicological documents and articles about LilyPond,
but not a main editor for LilyPond.

Since the main problem in that article is to deal with the "I can't read
this, even though I (probably) can write it" aspect of LaTeX which is
pretty much the same problem space for LilyPond, it might be useful to
go idea-fishing.

I think that the mock-up approach used by LyX would usually already make
most people happy (page layout control not being required on a permanent
basis).  At any rate, I think that an efficient workflow should try
avoiding the need for more than a single editing window.

-- 
David Kastrup