♩ ScoreRender ♫

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.