Re: Hushing up Sibelius news?

[Urs Liska]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2013 19:16:30 +0100
Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> wrote:

> (Apologies to David, I hit "Reply" instead of "Reply List" when first writing 
> this response.)
> 
> On 02/22/2013 12:10 AM, David Kastrup wrote:
> > If the file format describes exactly how the finished score will appear,
> > what will happen with the spacing when transposing?  Presumably it is
> > ingrained into the file, so how will everything get retrofitted?
> 
> I think his point was that _no_ file format ever describes exactly how the 
> finished score would appear -- it depends on the internal algorithms of the 
> software that processes the file format.
> 
> Reading between the lines, I think that what may be being suggested there is 
> that, to make the format "useful" they would have to provide not just spec 
> for 
> the format, but also spec for how that format should be interpreted by an 
> application -- and surprise surprise, they want to keep those algorithms a 
> closely guarded secret ...
I'm not sure that's completely true.
Lilypond's file format (or 'input language') is open, and that would useful 
even if the algorithms were not (and for me they aren't open because I don't 
understand them ...).
I can read the input file (without knowing exactly how it will look like), I 
can process the input file with a machine, I can diff it, I can use programs to 
generate an input file.
I find all this extremely useful, regardless of how the result will finally 
look like and how the software achieves this result.

So I don't see any opposition between an open file format and secret formatting 
algorithms.


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