Re: MEI to LilyPond conversion

[Urs Liska]

Am Dienstag, den 21.01.2020, 10:21 +0100 schrieb Jacques Menu:
> Hello Urs,
> 
> Thanks for correcting me as to the relationship between MEIler and
> Verovio.
> 
> In what respect is Verovio superior to Lily, 

It provides live rendering with automatic reflow and engraving inside a
browser window, and it is blazingly fast at it. LilyPond will probably
never achieve that kind of usability in an interactive setting.
This comes at the inherent cost of making much cheaper design
decisions. Verovio is astonishingly good at that, but I'd argue it will
never get to LilyPond's level of automatic engraving quality.

That's why I've been lobbying for having both Verovio and LilyPond as
two coequal rendering channels for MEI documents.

> and what do you mean by 'not really scalable’? 

For every little feature that one wants supported one has to *add* to
the set of conversion rules. This makes it harder to maintain than
necessary, and it will probably make it even slower if it should
approach comprehensiveness.

Urs

> 
> JM
> 
> > Le 21 janv. 2020 à 10:16, Urs Liska <address@hidden> a écrit
> > :
> > 
> > Am Dienstag, den 21.01.2020, 10:09 +0100 schrieb Jacques Menu:
> > > Hello folks,
> > > 
> > > MEI has been mentionned at the Salzburg conference as more and
> > > more
> > > used in the academic circles. 
> > > 
> > > Jan-Peter said that an MEI to Lily translator would be useful,
> > > and
> > > RISM’s Laurent Pugin presented Verovio (
> > > https://www.verovio.org/index.xhtml), which features an XSL/XSLT
> > > such
> > > translator named MEIler (MEI Lilypond Engraving Refinement, 
> > > https://github.com/rettinghaus/meiler).
> > > 
> > 
> > MEIler is independent from Verovio, and developed by Klaus
> > Rettinghaus
> > privately.
> > 
> > > My questions are: do you feel the need for a MEI to LilyPond
> > > translator, and has anyone experience with MEIler?
> > 
> > a)
> > There is a *strong* need for a reliable and fast translator from
> > MEI to
> > LilyPond (and vice versa) to make LilyPond an acceptable tool in
> > the
> > digital edition community.
> > Currently Verovio is the community's darling, and while it is
> > superior
> > to LilyPond in one respect (and an important one for that
> > community) it
> > is succinctly inferior in another respect. Currently the tendency
> > in
> > the MEI community seems to be to accept this inferiority and be
> > sort-of 
> > happy with incomplete and suboptimal engraving, just like society
> > accepted awful matrix printers for the first DTP possibilities.
> > 
> > b)
> > I once did a larger project with it, and I'd say that while it is a
> > surprisingly good tool it is not a "real" solution to the problem:
> > it's
> > too slow and not really scalable.
> > 
> > Urs
> > 
> > > Thanks for your help!
> > > 
> > > JM
> > > 
> > >