♩ ScoreRender ♫

A new bug fix release, well, actually not entirely bug fixes but contain improvements in ABC and Guido notation images. Due to previously inaccurate guessworks, Guido images look blurred while ABC images often have their widths exceeding user setting. The resizing and zooming are now more accurately calculated, so those problems should disappear.

Now for something special: this release is dedicated to David T. L. Wong, a seasoned free software developer in Hong Kong, also a respected and highly regarded member in local forums. Some of his major contribution to free software community include work in DMB-TH digital tv driver for linux kernel and an USENET client for Android. It was apparent that he was still posting to forums a few days ago, without apparent mentioning of any kind of problem. But all of a sudden, he’s gone. So far details are sparse, but many people are eager to help out — donation to his family members, helping in funeral and so on. There’s even a dedicated Facebook page!

Although I’m not familiar with him (no acquaintance, unlike some of my friends who do see him from time to time), wish him rest in peace and is well in heaven.

Other than the license change, this release incorporates quite a few backports and fixes. The more visible ones include:

• Change of license to AGPL v3.
• Moving the ‘Show Source’ setting to Contents section in admin page.
• A bug was discovered a few days ago, that notation without any program name was not deactivated correctly. Command line was still executed without the program name, which of course resulted in error. That behavior was fixed.
• Yet another fix for Lilypond, because previous one was not quite correct. Now safe mode is re-enabled for all versions of lilypond.
• Since I-don’t-know-when, ImageMagick can properly read bilevel (that is 1-bit) transparency from PostScript level 1, while it can’t before. This leads to a slight change in command line when invoking convert. Gotta create a code name called ‘curse ImageMagick’ (ok, kidding)

Yet another new release is out. Some fixes are backported from trunk:

• When showing image only (score is not clickable, that is), also add image dimension as well, for speeding up HTML rendering.
• Fix line break when showing score source code under Windows — always convert line break to \r\n when transferring data to clipboard.
• Better auto-detection of programs. Make use of glob() under Windows and which command under Unix, with fallback if these are not available.
• Bug fix in program availability checking. If desired matching string is not found in the first line of program output, program detection would result in failure in previous versions.

After 8 months, here comes another major release. Highlight of this shiny release include:

• Philip’s Music Writer notation support.
• IE PNG Fix has been incorporated, which provides translucent PNG support for IE 5.5 and 6.x. No more whining when this plugin detected that your readers are using IE 5/6. Thanks to Angus Turnbull for the terrific yet easy to use IE filter!
• Zero Clipboard has been incorporated, which provides cross platform copy and paste function using Adobe Flash. No more whining again, but it’s Mozilla/Firefox and all other non-IE browsers instead. Oh yes, JavaScript and Flash must be there, of course. Thanks to jhuckaby for this great flash helper!
• Better support of installation on web hostings. This has been described in another post.
• Rendering also depends on ‘unfiltered_html‘ WordPress capability.
• Functions and files are completely refactored, so admin page is only included when needed, and PHP classes no longer access global variables as it has been done before.

As usual, please visit installation page on how to install the plugin. You will need to install extra required programs for this plugin to function as well, and they are sometimes not as easy as installing the plugin itself. If you managed this part, you can visit notation introduction page to start publishing your blog with music content!

The much delayed release is out now. Download it by clicking on download icon!

Here is the list of more prominent changes since 0.1.x version:

1. Remove markup configuration, and adds lots more config options
2. Show statistics in dashboard
3. Clickable image showing music source
4. Start to migrate to PHP5-style classes
5. Image conversion routine redone
6. Allow clearing cache within admin page

However, to be sincere, some of the changes do make me worried, namely:

1. Requirement of PHP5: though PHP5 growth is a bit stronger after PHP4 end of life, we are still seeing 41% adoption of PHP5 only (statistics by nexen). That means half of potential users can’t upgrade…
2. Requirement of newer ImageMagick: I can’t stop cursing ImageMagick maintainers for this one. All packagers and software developers used to curse them, now I can feel the hatred in the guts too. ImageMagick can change API, compatilibility and even command line options between any minor, or even patch level releases! Damn it. Software versioning is completely meaningless for ImageMagick. As I have said before, -channel alpha no more creates alpha channel, causing all transparency rendering broken with previous release. However, not that many web servers have newest ImageMagick installed. I’d say the restriction is even more serious than PHP one. Perhaps I may need to think of another way to circumvent the problem in the coming releases.
3. Potential of XSS on showcode.php: right now showcode.php reads music fragment from POST request and dumps them only after minimal content filtering. I’m a bit worried it can be susceptible to XSS. Perhaps there is need to fire up XSS scanners in short future.

When compared with 0.1.2 release, this one only contains 2 lines of change, but still worths it, since these 2 lines add a bit of security using nonce — which is basically a random number designed to forbid direct submission of form without entering admin page. As usual, zip file and gzip’ed tarball are available.

ScoreRender 0.1.2 is out there. This maintenance release contains only very minor changes:

Add +repage option to ImageMagick convert, in order to make sure no white edge exists in images after trimming. Otherwise, some images will retain layer info and render at an offset from origin (0,0).

Version 0.1.1 has just been released which plugged 2 problems I discover just after 0.1 release:

1. Transparency for lilypond fragment not correctly handled
2. Conflict with “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” option under Options → Writing

However, I don’t have any good resolution to solve second problem. This means people will need to turn off that option, otherwise Lilypond and Mup contents will be clobbered, causing render error. What is done is to print a warning banner in admin page, telling people they should be aware of this issue. Some people may not install and use Lilypond and Mup, so this option wouldn’t bite them.

I’m happy to announce the first release of ScoreRender (DOWNLOAD), a Wordpress plugin for rendering inline sheet music fragments into images. It supports the following music notations:

• ABC
• GUIDO
• Lilypond
• Mup

This plugin is evolved from Chris Lamb’s FigureRender, which renders inline Lilypond as well as LaTeX fragments. The sad thing is, I didn’t manage to get Chris’ blessing to take over the development, and is still waiting for his answer.

Instruction for installation is located inside README.txt after extracting the compressed archive. Basically, copy the whole directory to /wp-content/plugins, activate the plugin in admin page, check if the options satisfy your need, and enjoy! (well, learning the notations is another thing…)

Please don’t hesitate to give any suggestion for feature request, bug fix and so on. In particular, you can file bug report in wp-plugins.org (“Submit bug report” link on the right) if you have already registered an account in wordpress support forum. Otherwise just leave a message here and I’ll try my best to answer ASAP.