WebLily.net - Running LilyPond on the web

Only recently (why so late?) did I come to know LilyPond, the fantastic music engraving software. Being impressed by its simplicity and its beautyful results and at times overwhelmed by the wealth of its functions and options I came up with the idea of making it available on the web.

This is an experimental project. I am exploring the realm of web programming using Google's Web Toolkit. The output is true HTML so hopefully it will run on any browser. Since I am not an experienced programmer doing this just as a hobby you might know what you'll have to expect.

May be people who are new to LilyPond and just want to play around with it will find this to be a useful tool, since they do not have to download and to install the software on their machines.

Currently, WebLily.net works fine for small (i.e. really very small) examples.

Known limitations:

• any LiliPond input larger than really small will send the website to computational nirvana
• some graphical objects are still missing without any warning, e.g. beams
  
• the signs "<" and ">" will not be recognized, there still is a problem converting to/from HTML
• depending on the browser non-ASCII characters in will show up as "?"
• PDF output is still missing

I am working on this and I'd appreciate your feedback. Please, let me know what you think about it. Write a comment to this blog or send me a personal message.