* Han-Wen Nienhuys
[to me, who was mumbling about tex/mf math-style extensible brackets]
> that seems overkill for the bracket.
It may seem overkill, but it's _exactly_ the way oversized (math)
brackets, braces, parantheses and other delimiters are implemented in
TeX.
Of course, when writing ordinary TeX, you get the additional advantage
of TeX selecting a suitable size to go around your sybformula. I'm
not sure if we could get the same advantage.
> The vertical part is just a rule.
Sure.
> All that has to be done, is making sure that the pixels of the
> "hooks" and the rule align.
Sure. Horisontally as well as vertically. TeX has a way to do this,
where it (well, actually mf) also scales the rule approperiately.
> The rule can be done with \[hv]rule, but I'd rather move towards PS
> in stead of TeX. The current setup forces an awkward 3 pass system
> onto the user (lilypond, tex, xdvi)
As has already been said, TeX has its pros. And in my experience, the
tex run takes very little time compared to the lilypond run.[3] Creative
makefile rules can be your friend here, too, if you want to avoid
_seeing_ that last step.
On the other hand, running til output file through TeX requires either
(a) write access to wherever TeX lives, (b) help from your friendly
TeX administrator, or (c) close knowledge of how to set up extensions
to TeX outside of the central installation. In other words: Not only
do you need to have TeX installed, often you need {to be|help from} a
TeXpert as well.
[...]
>
> Dus jij kan ook Nederlands? Gewelfdig!
Dank U waal.
No, I don't speak dutch -- except for saying "thank you", "good
morning" and "one beer"[1].
> But seriously. If this really is a problem, then I gladly take
> suggestions. However the number of patches to the MF sources that I
> have received still is zero, nada. No one seems to care.
It's not a huge problem, but it _does_ make reading some of the
documentation[2] a bit troublesome.
[1] and I _don't_ know how to say "please". :-)
[2] source code comments, variable names and file names are
documentation. Most of them are in english -- the rest is dutch to
me.
[3] A sample, real-life lilypond run, measured with the `time` command
on a rather sluggish SparcStation 2 running Solaris) just took me
13 minutes, 31.2 seconds real time (9:49.6 user time); the
corresponding tex run took 21.2 seconds real time (11.6 user).
--
Arvid
