[MEI-L] mup & lilypond et al.

[Craig Sapp]

Hi Sigfrid,

Here is the result you desire, a high-quality SVG image (displayed inline
depending on your mail reader/browser, otherwise see the .svg attachment):

[image: Inline images 1]

Generation of such an image could be automated, but probably too complex to
deal with for a small project.  It would also involve CGI interfacing to
the DOS version of SCORE via dosemu:
   http://wiki.ccarh.org/wiki/Dosemu
Also, you would need to use Wine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software) to run a Windows command-line
program to automatically adjust beam angles/heights using a program called
BEAM written by Tom Brodhead:
   http://home.comcast.net/~tom.brodhead
And a ruby script to convert SCORE EPS files into SVG:
    https://github.com/th-we/seps2svg

For full automation, three manual operations were needed to generate the
above example:
(1) layout -- I copied the layout that you gave.  Automated layout in SCORE
is possible, but that would add moderatly to the complexity.
(2) vertical placement of measure tags.  I put the tags at vertical step 15
in SCORE, and adjust them higher by hand when they collided with the music.
 This would be relatively simple to automate.
(3) note offsets such as in measure 7 LH would need to be automated.  Also
relatively simple.

The most difficult measure to automatically typeset would be measure 9
(first full measure of the second system).  Presumably you chose to do the
cross staff beaming of notes rather than MUP?  And would this instruction
be encoded in the MEI data?  MUP had two difficulties in this measure: (1)
attaching notes correctly to the beam, and (2) raising the rests to
accommodate the notes.  This will cause problems for most all automatic
typesetting programs.

Lilypond will give slightly higher-quality results than MUP but not by a
large amount.  The main advantage of lilypond is that it can handle a wide
range of musical symbols as well as be able to handle slightly more complex
music than MUP can.  Lilypond is reasonably fast but probably slower than
MUP.  Lilypond can output SVG images.  MUP can also be used to generate SVG
images by sending the PostScript output through GhostScript or inkscape.
 Both lilypond and MUP SVG output will be very messy looking in terms of
the code because both of them do not calculate the SVG data directly, but
send through an external library/program.

Abcm2ps (ABC+) will give a slightly lower quality result.  The cross-staff
notation of measure 9 cannot be handled by ABC+ or abcm2ps (as far as I am
aware).  The main advantage of abcm2ps printing (via a GCI interface) is
that it is very fast (implemented in C).  I don't know the quality/behavior
of the JavaScript interface to abc. Using abcm2ps (http://moinejf.free.fr)
would be similar to MUP, and SVG output could be done through GhostScript
or inkscape.

Vexflow I cannot imagine can handle music of this complexity.  Someone who
uses vexflow can post this example generated by vexflow to prove me wrong
:-).


-=+Craig


On 29 October 2013 05:26, Sigfrid Lundberg <slu at kb.dk> wrote:
>
> I've been working on a project which involves automatic generation of
scores from an eXist native XML database containing musical segments. I've
coded a MEI generator in the XQuery language, and the result is then
translated into mup and from there to either PDF or MIDI. I'm working in
MEI 2010-05 but are looking for a way forward to more modern MEI and higher
quality PDF or even better SVG.
>
> Please find generated xml, pdf and midi attached (if it survives the
listserv, they are miniscule and shouldn't hur bandwidth)
>
> Suggestions. Should I go for MEI 2013, and I suppose Lilypond? Any other
ideas? The system has to run batch server side on a Linux server.
>
> Any opinions?
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