Welcome to project Roemer

What?

Professional music typesetting, according to the book "The Art Of Music Copying" by Clinton Roemer. Reads MusicXML, CMN, ABC and Guido. Produces MIDI, PostScript, PDF, PNG and SVG; from small images for the web to full printable sheet music.

Why?

Primarily for my personal use in studying music, I want an open source music typesetting system that can be used without mouse clicks all the time. There is currently no plan for a graphical user interface. Instead, input must be text, so it can be manipulated in an editor, or with scripts and regular expressions, stored in CVS, distributed via email. In this respect, it is going to be similar to LaTeX and music extensions for it.

I want to build the engine around the music typesetting rules described by Clinton Roemer in his fantastic book.

And I need some extra features that are not offered by other open source music typesetting software. For example, the system should be able to run on a web server and generate PNG images directly, possibly in direct response to user input.

How?

When I first considered this project, I thought it would be nice to do it in Java, mostly because of platform independence. But the major drawback would be the additional runtime cost. So I ended up with my favorite programming language for all projects over a thousand lines of code: Ada.

As a primary input format I chose MusicXML, because it is currently under active development, and looks very promising as a music notation interchange format. As an exercise I would like to add at least basic support for other notation formats as well, including CMN, ABC and Guido. The system should be able to export all input formats as well, so it can be used to convert between them.

As typesetting output format I chose PostScript because it is vector-based, so output looks good at any resolution. PostScript is also natively supported by a large number of printers. There are open source tools to convert PostScript to PDF.

Because I want to be able to run the system inside a web application, I also need raster image output from a built-in PostScript renderer. The output format is currently PGM (Portable Gray Map), which can be converted to PNG (Portable Network Graphics) with open source tools.

Who?

This project is being undertaken by Johann C. Rocholl as a summer research project at the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide, Australia, under supervision by Sylvan Elhay.