On 8/17/05, Pedro Kröger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Johannes Schindelin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > AFAIK SCORE was developed by a single person, in FORTRAN, > > ha! that's something.
It's true: SCORE is the work of Leland Smith, now professor (emeritus) of music at Stanford. SCORE was originally FORTRAN when Leland started developing on it the late *70s* (!) and I think that the current 4.x version is *still* FORTRAN (running, however, only under DOS). IMO, some of the most sophisticated engravers working today are using SCORE and I think the results show in the fact that something like 4 or 5 of the 6 Revere awards a year have recently gone to SCORE engravers (although I'm quoting from memory here, so doublecheck before passing that on). I think that stealing (or courting?) the SCORE users is an excellent idea; they're not in the slightest bit adverse to really learning the most detailed internals of a program and would probably bring an excellent eye to some of the very real problems we're tackling right now in LilyPond development: the tie problem is only the most recent example. > > > Also, he was not very forthcoming with information about internals. > > yeah, I didn't think so. > > > If my memory serves me, there is a SCORE list. > > yep, here is: > > http://ace.acadiau.ca/score/s-list.htm Just mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; the list is run by Gordon Callon in Canada. Quite unfortunately there are no list archives :-( but, quite happily, the list is responsive, open and professional (much like our own, really). > > We could steal the users directly from there... But for this to > > happen, we would have to reverse engineer the SCORE format. > > hum, it's a binary format right? I've forgotten that. No, no, not to worry: the SCORE native format .mus (not the same as the Finale .mus) *is* binary ... but there's this magic cleartext format ending in .pmx. From the SCORE UI you can turn *any* file into .pmx and read, parse, tweak to your heart's content; many SCORE users do it all the time and the documentation is complete. Once you've parsed / tweaked your .pmx, you can read the modified file back into SCORE directly. This .pmx format gives the ability to write extremely sophisticated editing macros (or tweak algorithmically, if you like). > I just checked this webpage: > > http://www.scoremus.com/score.html > > They have it now for $200-360 (the old price was ridiculous) No, the price is still ridiculous: it's $750 / license (you must be quoting the price for one of the ancillary programs). I'm by no means an expert SCORE user, but I have used the program on and off for the last 2 years. It's an excellent program for many of *exactly* the same reasons that Lily is an excellent program: you have real control -- not fake, Sibelius-style control -- over anything you want; you have a cleartext input format; you have outstanding postscript output; you have an incredibly intelligent user community of expert engravers, composers and instrumentalists to support you. The primary downpoints to SCORE are all quite apparent: 1. SCORE runs *only* under DOS (though it works fine in emulation under whatever Windows you want, and it works fine in Windows emulation under OS X) 2. SCORE has unbelievably harsh memory- and filesize restrictions; if you go beyond a certain number of postscript vectors per file, SCORE blows an error; the practical upshot of this is that I never have more than about 8 or 10 staves in a single file; if I'm working on an orchestral SCORE, well, then, it's 3 or 4 *files* per single system (muchless page) of music 3. SCORE is developed by a genius ... but that genius is 80 years old (in fact there's been a minor birthday celebration going on for Leland on the SCORE list) and the rate of release is absolutely glacial; I'm not criticizing Leland ... as far as I'm concerned the work he put into SCORE and the state of refinement the program reached justifies absolutely anything he wants to do, developmentwise or other. However, the fact remains that the development cycle has, imo, essentially ended and, more severely, that the code is utterly closed; no one has access to the sources and so there's a grave concern about what happens to the tool in the eventual future :-( * * * So, the obvious point here is that LilyPond absolutely excels at all three of SCORE's major weaknesses: 1. LilyPond runs on absolutely everything under the sun 2. LilyPond has absolutely no memory or size limitations at all, AFAICT; I render Lily scores with several thousands glyphs per page on tabloid paper all the time and nothing ever breaks (well ... so long as you turn off point-and-click!); there's absolutely *no* circumstance under which Lily users have to separate out musical material into separate files to accomodate an extramusical technical requirement 3. Lily is also developed by a genius ... but a genius pursuing the exact *opposite* political approach to code access and the development cycle: Lily's not going anywhere, the sources are all available forever, new releases show up constantly, and the only barrier to contribution is the learning curve So it should be clear by now where I stand: I think it's an obvious transition for SCORE users to start moving over the Lily. They're reluctant to give up the tool, of course, because of its sophistication, but I think that literally every 2 or 3 weeks the reasons to jump to Lily increase, even for the community of professionals currently working in SCORE. * * * I considered crossposting this response to the score list (again, [EMAIL PROTECTED], if anyone's interested) but thought it might be more appropriate to let discussion run private to Lily for a while longer. Another reflection: I feel certain that some type of constructive, even semi-formal dialogue is possible with the SCORE community. The wealth of accumulated knowledge there is almost unbelievable: if you're looking for exact answers to questions of tie placement, slur placement, hairpin positioning on the horizontal, accidental tesselation before complex chords, the SCORE people are a good place to talk. I don't have the time to moderate that discussion right now myself, but I have to imagine that there should be some way to welcome that knowledge into Lily and help our own growth here. Trevor. _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
