[Commons-l] Call for help: improve LilyPond's SVG support!

[Benjamin Esham]

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,
-- 
Benjamin D. Esham
bdesham at gmail.com  |  AIM: bdesham128  |  Jabber: same as e-mail
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