The Communications of the TEX Users Group Volume 29 ... - TUG

A newbie’s experiences with Lilypond, Lilypond-book, L ATEX and Perl
Joe M c Cool
Southern Regional College, Ireland
mccoolj (at) src dot ac dot uk
http://benburb.demon.co.uk/apache2-default/joe.html
1 What’s out there
Abstract
The author is an active Irish traditional musician. He is also a keen inland boater.
He is having a lot of fun composing a book on “Traditional Music for Boaters”.
In this paper he describes his successes and frustrations using Lilypond,
Lilypond-book, L ATEX and ABC musical notation. Lilypond and L ATEX have a lot
in common. Neither are WYSIWYG, neither demand GUI’s. Both compile simple
flat files to produce beautiful graphical output.
Lilypond’s original manifestations produced output directly for L ATEX, but of
late users writing books have been encouraged to use Lilypond-book. This looks
for Lilypond code within L ATEX source files and produces graphics and associated
instructions which can then be processed by L ATEX.
Most joy has come from automating these processes via GNU/Linux and Perl.
By definition classical music has an inherent connection
with books and text. Traditional music does not.
Classical music is written down in scores. Historically,
traditional music is not. It is largely an aural
medium and tunes are learnt by ear. Having said
that, musical scores do now have an important role
to play. More and more young traditonal musicians
are learning how to read scores. Printed material
allows us to store pieces that would otherwise be lost
and pencil and paper is a useful aid to composition.
Musicians like to share pieces and the arrival
of the personal computer has made this easier than
ever. But, where years ago we popped manuscripts in
the post, we now need to share scores electronically.
This has brought about a plethora of programs and
systems that enable us to do so.
1.1 ABC notation
In the 1980’s Chris Walshaw, then at the University
of Cambridge, began writing out fragments of
folk/traditional tunes using letters to represent the
notes. This became gradually formalised into what
is known as the ABC “standard”. 1 Numerous small
programs have appeared to convert ASCII files of
ABC to printed scores. 2 There are also programs to
convert ABC code to midi.
Here’s an example of an ABC file:
X: 1
T:The trout
1 www.walshaw.plus.com/abc
2 for example, moinejf.free.fr
C:Franz Schubert
O:Austria
M:C|
L:1/8
Q:1/4=160
K:C
G2|"C"c2c2e2e2|"C"c4G2G2|"G"G3G dcBA|"G"
G4 z2G2|"C"c2c2 e2e2|"C"c4G2c2|"G"B2AB
....
The K: field represents the tune’s key. All lines
below this contain the music. Lines above are header
fields, with X: representing an index for this particular
tune in a file of other ABC’s. Notes in quotes
represent accompaniment chords.
At first sight ABC seems ideal for what I wish
to do. It has a simple input format. It can output
PostScript files that I can incorporate into L ATEX
documents. ABC programs are open source and,
most importantly, there are huge collections of ABC
source files available on the internet.
But, I have a few issues with ABC:
• there is a gross lack of standardisation. What
standardisation exists is often ignored by the
authors of ABC files.
• I need a system comparable to L ATEX in terms
of typesetting quality. ABC does not have the
fine grained control of L ATEX.
• It is difficult to avoid clashing problems: note
heads clashing with bar numbers, or grace notes
clashing with accidentals.
• At the time I started my project, the ABC mailing
list seemed to vanish!
376 TUGboat, Volume 29 (2008), No. 3 — Proceedings of the 2008 Annual Meeting