My passion has always been transforming interesting-scientific-experiment-grade technology, into things that actually work.

Today's digital typography, pioneered by researchers like Dr. D.E.Knuth, works extremely well for textual content. Nienhuys and Nieuwenhuizen have shown that, beautiful music engraving can be done using principles similar to those in Dr. Knuth's TeX. Their system, GNU LilyPond, does solve the problem of engraving quality, in an exceedingly satisfactory manner.

However, when it comes to producing real top-quality books, -- such as Critical Editions of old music -- there are also other dimensions than engraving quality. These other dimensions, prove not to be the focus of the upstream community. (Nor should they really be: same way like in Linux, the guys like Linus have a different role than the distro vendors). In this presentation, I talk about how I helped a real-life end-user achieve their goals with the publication of a Critical Edition of 16th Century plainchant.