Laurent Martelli wrote:
> Isn't it redundant with Lily ? Couldn't you extract the parsing code
> out of Lily, and make a library of it ? I believe that Lily already
> has the code to turn .ly files into C/C++ structures useable by a
> program, so all you need is to remove the typesetting part.
>
> Just a suggestion.
>
> --
> Laurent Martelli
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Guess I should put our cards on the table and explain why we wanted to
code a file format and parser for Denemo.
The thing is, we are interested in doing computer musicology, not just
typesetting. We are therefore designed a file format which is not as
mark-up-centred as Lilypond's, but which can easily be used as a storage
system for something like Denemo. The emphasis is that it is
human-readable, but not intended to be written by humans necessarily.
Matt did us the honour of allowing us to write the save and load routines
using this format. It's not clear that our format will be the /ultimate/
load and save format for Denemo, although we will make sure it can be
used as an import/export filter to communicate with our musicological
analysis work. It will also interface freely with our (alas non-free)
optical score recognition package and Expressive MIDI. We felt it would
be great to cooperate with Matt on the Denemo project rather than write a
half-baked clone with a different back end so you had to import our stuff
into Denemo to print things out.
So we have a hidden agenda in thinking up a new file format. A paper
explaining our reasoning is in preparation, so if you're really
interested, you can look at it if/when it gets published. The main thing
is that we might want to retain stuff from the Denemo front end for
musicological analysis purposes which you would not want to see in a
markup language, like subtleties of accidental displacement, the way
slurs are drawn and so on. You wouldn't need, or often even want, this
stuff cluttering up the language designed for markup, preferring instead
to leave the work to the typesetter (the LaTeX vs Word argument). We did
think long before inventing yet another representation; we hate
duplication of work, really! 8-)
Nick/
--
Dr N J Bailey, mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Deputy Director, Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music
Lecturer in Applied Computing, School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering
University of Leeds. http://www.ee.leeds.ac.uk/homes/NJB
