Hi all,

I was recently playing around with GNU LilyPond, trying to export some music clips as SVG for use on the Commons. I had a bunch of rendering issues, and after posting to the LilyPond list I was told that there weren't enough developers familiar with SVG to really fix all of the outstanding problems.

LilyPond, as you can see from [1], produces beautiful output; it is certainly the most prominent free-software music engraving package. I am writing to this list as an open request to all of the developers out there: please help to improve LilyPond's support for SVG! I have found many unattractive images from Sibelius that could be replaced with Lily images, but I prefer not to use raster images when everything is originally vectors anyway (LilyPond's native output format is PDF).

Surely there are a number of competent programmers here who are familiar with the SVG format; if you are one of them, please consider visiting [2] and seeing what needs to be done to make LilyPond's SVG output as beautiful to XML parsers as it is to humans.

(Related to this is WikiTeX [3]; I haven't heard much about that project's integration with Wikipedia recently, but LilyPond's support for SVG will be very important once that project gets off the ground.)

Thanks a ton for any help and code you can contribute!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_LilyPond [2] http://lilypond.org/web/devel/participating/call-for-help [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Music_markup

Cheers,