A music notation engraving library

The third release of this year (5.3) has been published. This release includes an important refactoring of the SVG structure – specifically, the way font glyphs are included in the SVG. If your project relies on the SVG structure, you may want to double-check that nothing breaks on your side when upgrading to this new version. A major advantage of the new structure is that it makes the SVG compatible with a wider range of SVG renderers.

Another important feature introduced in this version is support for editorial markup around the top-level score definition, allowing for more flexible alternate staff ordering and staff labeling.

A lower-level feature added in this release is a page-based MEI serialization option for temporarily storing and reloading laid-out data, which can be useful for caching in dynamic or server-side applications. This feature is still in development and will be consolidated and documented in upcoming releases.

Version 5.2 is now out with some nice contributions from external contributors. The first one is the implementation of tablature features newly introduced in MEI 5.1 as part of the E-Laute project.

The other contribution is the rendering of score annotations encoded with control events annot elements. This was implemented as part of a follow-up project of the Beethoven in the House project at the Oxford e-Research Centre.

The additional improvements brought in version 5.2 include better support for repetitions encoded with expansion elements, more flexible staff ordering, and support for SMuFL encoding for note heads.