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meira

An MEI-to-SVG renderer using only XSLT 2.0

meira stands for MEI rendering application. This is a project that was implemented for Edirom and must be regarded as highly experimental. No further development on this project is intended for reasons outlined in the Results section below.

Motivation

At the time development started, the options available for rendering MEI were very limited. XSLT was picked for the following reasons:

  • MEI and SVG are both XML formats, XSLT is meant to transform one XML into another - looks like a natural choice.
  • XSLT is a well established technology in the MEI community.
  • I didn't know anything about XSLT when I started this project.

Results

  • I developed some profound XSLT skills by jumping in at the deep end.
  • It is possible to render music with XSLT.
  • It is extremely slow.
  • To take the project to a decent level of quality and completeness, processing time would still increase by some order of magnitude.
  • XSLT isn't suitable for this kind of task.

How to try

Use an XSLT 2.0 processor, e.g. Saxon. Move to the meira folder and run the following:

java -classpath path/to/saxonb.jar net.sf.saxon.Transform Beispiele/Chopin_Mazurka.mei mei2svg.xsl > musx2svg/mazurka.svg

Replace path/to/saxonb.jar with the proper path to the Saxon B jar file on your system. Don't try rendering meira/Beispiele/Weber-op34-A.xml. It will take your computer an extremely long time to find out the latest revision of meira has a bug that prevents it from rendering.