13 Mar
2004
13 Mar
'04
10:06 a.m.
On Friday 12 Mar 2004 6:49 pm, Chris Metzler wrote:
Is there any chance that some of that typesetting
capability -- in
particular, the ability to print clean, organized sheet music for
distribution to others and performance use, with the ability to
adjust measures per line and mark repeats and alternate end bars
and so on -- will find its way into Rosegarden's notation editor
and printing facility?
Yes, there certainly is -- with caveats. My own original area of
interest in Rosegarden (as the longest-running developer on the
project) is in notation, and I'm very keen to continue developing
that.
But Rosegarden is intended to be a compositional tool rather than,
say, a score typesetter, and that shows: it's unlikely that you'll
ever get a printed score from it that matches what you could do with
Lilypond or Sibelius (except of course if you export to Lilypond from
Rosegarden). There are several practical reasons for that, other
than simply that we have so many other things to work on as well.
One reason is that we always put more work into making things look
good and work well when edited interactively at screen resolutions
before we consider how they might be adjusted for printing. Another
important reason is that we're inclined to favour features that can
be made common between the notation editor and the rest of the
program, so that for example repeats and alternate endings in
notation become harder to implement because they ideally ought to be
represented in the sequencer-style segment canvas as well.
Still, Rosegarden is unlikely to reach 1.0 without having a few more
essential notation features like repeats, alternate endings, Joerg's
favourite 8va sections, grand staffs, and the ability to do fine
adjustments on the positions of individual elements. Quicker
printing and better integrated Lilypond invocation are also
priorities.
Chris