Re: Tools for harmonic analysis (Riemann style)

[Urs Liska]

Hi Malte,

Am 27.04.19 um 10:49 schrieb Malte Meyn:
> Am 26.04.19 um 14:45 schrieb Lukas-Fabian Moser:
> > > I might also be willing to use LaTeX for the creation of the symbols 
> > > because I could then combine efforts for a standalone LaTeX package 
> > > to produce the symbols in continuous text too.
> >
> > I'd very much argue for a LilyPond-only solution in order to rely as 
> > little as possible on a specific toolchain.
>
> As said before 
> (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2019-04/msg00344.html) 
> I already made a LilyPond-only solution that I abandoned because it 
> wasn’t easy to include in LaTeX, see attachment.


That looks really great, and it's a pity you abandoned it. But I can of 
course understand your rationale. However, as impressive as your 
font-based approach is, I would really prefer having a package that does 
it "live", i.e. does the combination of sub-symbols while engraving or 
typesetting. That will provide much more flexibility on the long run, as 
it is possible to create new or custom functionality without having to 
modify a rather "opaque" object like a font. And I will definitely want 
to have the symbols in arbitrary fonts. Now, having the experience 
through lyluatex that my music examples automatically have the same text 
fonts as the surrounding text document, I would never again accept music 
examples with LilyPond's default text fonts in my documents, and I'm 
sure this will go for analysis symbols as well (or, if I want them to be 
in a different font, I'd probably want to *choose* that font freely).

Although I know that keeping two projects in parallel is a serious 
maintenance issue I think the best path forward (at least from my 
perspective and not at all ruling out a font-based approach in parallel) 
is creating a LilyPond-based solution, make that as generic as possible 
and then think about a way for LaTeX. What would definitely work is 
basically rebuilding that LilyPond solution (with a matching user 
interface) as an independent LaTeX package. Maybe it would even be 
possible to use lyluatex (and its option to integrate LilyPond snippets 
directly in the continuous text) to have LilyPond engrave the symbols 
on-the-fly and essentially find a way to *integrate* the LilyPond 
solution in LaTeX that way. (This is also why I basically decided not to 
do any further work on my lilyglyphs package, since lyluatex essentially 
can to the same and much more, with the only downside of requiring 
LilyPond (and *lua*tex) to be available.) Such an approach would either 
be a standalone package or an addition to lyluatex where a special 
command would wrap the \lilypond{} command to generate a custom file 
around the given commands to generate a single analysis symbol or a 
sequence thereof. Actually I think that should be rather simple (with 
the single drawback that it would be LuaLaTeX-only solution).

Best
Urs