Software
Purple Frog Press uses a variety of software to accomplish our mission to create the highest-quality products.
In Print
All music published by Purple Frog Press is first created or imported into the LilyPond music notation software. This free, open-source software provides beautifully engraved output bringing to mind the quality of the old Bährenreiter editions. The software is well-maintained and updated often, incorporating complete ancient and “Classical” practice styles as well as the latest in modern techniques. LilyPond natively creates PDF files as the final output allowing for direct-to-web publishing. The PDF format also easily allows the editors to create fully-bound versions, to add complex free notation, and to easily adapt the final output to varying page sizes.
Following the creation of the music PDF files, all scores bound for print are next processed through Adobe’s InDesign software. This allows for the greatest manipulation possible, giving our designers and editors great freedom to create beautiful editions of music in a short amount of time.
On the Web
We use only standard compliant XHTML and CSS in the creation of our web pages. We are proud to display the W3C Validation Credentials. In addition, we have striven to achieve accessibility guidelines on all our pages. We are currently AA accessible, as defined by the W3C WCAG 1.0 and are working towards AAA accessibility. Finally, we also adhere to USC Section 508 accessibility (specifically ยง1194.22).
Our pages are served by the Apache Web Server, managed through Adobe’s Dreamweaver and are scripted in PHP.
We use Zen Cart for our shopping cart needs. The Zen Cart was the most easily modifiable and appear to be the most concerned with standards compliance.
For our blog, we use WordPress. Like the Zen Cart, it allows for easy template modification and is fairly standards compliant out of the box. It also allows us to easily integrate the different composers as authors and other handy features.
