Re: lilypond / inkscape

[David Kastrup]

Gerard McConnell <address@hidden> writes:

> I often see topics introduced here in which solutions are sought for
> font-related or position-related problems.  Almost all of these
> problems are easily solved by creating an SVG file with Lilypond and
> then editing that file with Inkscape.    What is the downside of
> working this way? 

Lilypond is a batch system making a lot of automatic typesetting
decisions.  One of its strong points is that it is very friendly for
doing revisions and arriving at output that it is as good as if the
revision would have been part of the original score to start with.  You
can also reproduce the score at various stages with various variants of
Lilypond, if you checked the score into a version control system.  Every
version is completely reproducible and all its input is there.

If you post-edit the output manually, the straight connection between
input and output is gone.  This loss of transparency and determinism is
bad for a lot of workflows.

Basically, this situation is not all that different to the respective
advantages of the workflows of typical LaTeX documents as compared to
common WYSIWYG word processors.

-- 
David Kastrup