Re: Using extended mensural notation support for Lilypond

[Graham King]

On Wed, 2016-05-11 at 22:31 +0200, Noeck wrote:
> Hi,
>
> were there changes since "Extended mensural notation support for Lilypond":
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2015-02/msg00152.html
>
> Or in other words, can someone please show me how to use it? Is it
> usable directly or do I need to patch lilypond somehow? There were some
> discussions about including a patch back then, but I don't know if it
> happend.
<snip>
Joram, that's remarkable timing; I was looking into this subject earlier tonight.  I too would dearly like to get Lukas' enhancements to work.

Here's how I understand the status:

Back in February 2015 there were some very encouraging posts[1] on lilypond-devel, in which Lukas Pietsch submitted the last of the C++ patches for his work on mensural notation.  He referred to a dropbox[2] containing a document manual/custommensural.html that describes in scholarly detail what appears to be a largely-complete body of code representing a _huge_ advance in lilypond's ability to produce various early notations.  The patch to lilypond's /scm/output-ps.scm mentioned in the document seems to have been applied[3], as of lilypond 2.19.17.

This work clearly supersedes and surpasses the code published on Lukas' website[4] four years ago, so I've given up trying to get that earlier code working with 2.19.

The dropbox also contained a set of lilypond include files from 23 Feb 2015, but unfortunately one of them, lib.ly, seems to be missing, so I've been unable thus far to use the newer software.

I've tried emailing Lukas a couple of times over as many years, but without response, and I'm loth to pester him.  Even so, it is very sad that this remarkable improvement to lilypond appears to remain unusable.

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2015-02/msg00204.html
[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/nrcz11hkslsbc52/custommensural-2015-02-23.zip?dl=0
[3] http://sourceforge.net/p/testlilyissues/issues/3882/
[4] http://lukas-pietsch.de/Music/