Preparing the Ground

There is a Swedish expression, kratta manegen: literally, to rake the circus ring before the performance begins. Prepare the ground, clear away what shouldn't be there, make the arena ready.

For rather more than two years, that's what Ooloi has been doing.

This week I finally reached the place where I can open The Maids, double-click its score layout in the Piece Window, and watch a Layout Window appear. It contains almost nothing: a subtle background colour and a large, empty, scrollable surface.

Excellent.

This is where the music will be engraved. The rendering pipeline, spacing algorithms, geometric constraint solving, paintlists and Skija drawing will all end up here. The fact that the window is empty is precisely the point. Everything underneath it already exists.

I've also spent the past few weeks raking the arena in the other sense: finishing the Piece Window, completing undo and redo around its operations, tightening failure handling, localisation and editing behaviour, and removing the small architectural exceptions that would otherwise have followed us into the graphical work.

So here we are.

The ring is empty. The stage is set.