Hi,
I am the creator of Notezilla <http://www.notezilla.io>, a popular (and
fairly new) web application that allows users to both listen to classical
music, as well as see a scrolling representation of the score that has been
synced exactly to the recording.
A big thing for us is being able to generate horizontal scores, ie scores
where there are no line breaks or page breaks. This allows us and our users
to enjoy a very constant visual flow of the music without skipping around
too much. LilyPond is an integral component for us when it comes to
generating these scores, as it is very important to us that the music looks
and feels like "real" sheet music - this is one of the primary reasons for
why we love LilyPond.
Typically the way we have been generating the images of the sheet music
that we use on the website, is by setting some of the layout attributes to
really large values, for example:
ragged-last = ##t
paper-width = 2400.0\cm
paper-height = 50.0\cm
or perhaps
#(set! paper-alist (cons '("my size" . (cons (* 2000 in) (* 50 in)))
paper-alist))
#(set-default-paper-size "my size")
And then generating a pdf, which we then convert to images.
This works very well when generating a simple piece, such as a piano piece,
but whenever there are multiple instruments, and when the piece is very
long, such as is the case for most symphonies (which happen to be the most
popular pieces on Notezilla), the time required to typeset a file seems to
increase exponentially with the complexity of the music.
For a symphony, it could easily go from a few minutes, when using a default
layout, such as A4 or letter, to upwards of 10 hours, when using a custom
paper format that is extremely wide, for example a 500cm or 1000cm in
width. Please feel free to use this
link<https://s3.amazonaws.com/notezilla/other/Horizontal+Score+Beethoven+3-1+example.zip>
to
download the example that illustrates this - Beethoven's 3rd Symphony Mvt.
1. If I try running "lilypond ScoreMvtI.ly" in this example in a default
layout, it takes maybe 10-15 minutes or so to typeset. If I uncomment row
27 and 28 (which is where I specify the *huge* paper size), it takes maybe
10 hours...
I am wondering if someone on this mailing list knows of any work-arounds or
tricks that I could employ here to shorten the this time? The only
requirements for us is that, in the end, that we get one long horizontal
score, where the vertical spacing between the staffs is identical
throughout the piece. Whatever method we can use to get there would be
great to hear about! Maybe one way could be to split up the score into just
3-4 rows instead, and then merge these in Photoshop - my concern with that
method would be that the vertical distances between staffs would probably
not be identical, which would mean that the horizontal score simply would
not work...
I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Thank you very much for all the
work that has gone into LilyPond!
Best regards,
Erik Linde
-----
Using a Mac Book Pro with 16GB RAM, 2.3GHz i7, Max OS X 10.9.1 + and
LilyPond 2.18.0-1
_______________________________________________
lilypond-user mailing list
lilypond-user@gnu.org
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
