Re: Discussion: automatic engraving and single-source publishing

[Janek Warchoł]

2013/11/26 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
> Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I think that you personally are quite right to focus your efforts on
>> automation, but it doesn't mean that the efforts to build friendly
>> tweaking tools are a waste of time or resources ill-spent.
>
> The problem is not with the friendly tweaking tools but with the tweaks.
> If you put 1000 tweaks into some music document (and Janek somewhat
> proudly stated putting that amount in in a recent project of his),

;-)
I wasn't proud of myself, i was proud of \shape.

> the
> document is for all practical considerations locked to a particular
> paper format and a particular LilyPond version.  You might as well
> archive the PDF file rather than the LilyPond source, since the LilyPond
> source will become unusable much faster.
>
> Serious tweaking locks down the document almost as much as
> postprocessing with InkScape.

No, that's an overstatement.  Sure, one cannot update to new LilyPond
versions easily, but geting small modifications and corrections into
the scores remains easy.

> The number we want to be talking about is maybe a tweak every few pages.

Lol, good joke! ;-P
Achieving that will take us some time :)

> But if we are talking about a hundred tweaks per page, it is extremely
> unlikely that those tweaks are _not_ dealing with systematic problems,
> and dealing with systematic problems is something that the computer does
> with a lot less effort and boredom and tie-in than a human in the long
> run.

Yes, i definitely agree!  But i also agree with Joe wheh he says:

2013/11/26 Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden>:
> A growing user base corresponds to a much broader range of engraving
> scenarios and hence feedback that helps drive automation.

Case in point: exactly _because_ i had used \shape to tweak over a
1000 slurs, i was able to see how to best improve it, and now we'll
have the ability to use polar coordinates in \shape.  Which is a step
towards robustness and automation (for example, one \shape with polar
coordinates can often fix multiple slurs).  I have also learned a
great deal about how slurs in LilyPond behave in general, and
collected tons of examples, and i hope to use that knowledge to
improve actual slur formatting code (yes, i hope to continue working
on http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=3628 this
week...).

Bottom line: after \shaping 1000 slurs, i got really bored and
improved \shape.  After using it for the next 500 slurs, i expect to
get really bored again and fix some issues in slur formatting that
will bother me the most - because i'll be _personally motivated_ to do
so.  Repeat ad infinitum :-)

Janek