On 9 Nov 2005 at 16:14, Stephen Peters wrote:

> "David W. Fenton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 
> > Has anyone looked at Lilypond? I downloaded it last week and 
> > installed it, but for some reason, the GUI won't run.
> 
> Um, Lilypond has no GUI.  This is frankly rather clear if you read the
> Lilypond FAQ. . . .

Why, then, does the installer create a shortcut on my desktop with 
this commandline:

D:\Programs\LilyPond\usr\bin\lilypond-windows.exe -dgui

Why is there a switch there for a gui? Or is it a deceptively-named 
switch that has nothing whatsoever to do with a GUI?

> . . . There are other programs, such as NoteEdit or
> RoseGarden which do GUI entry of notes and can export to Lilypond
> format.
> 
> Can't speak to your problems installing it; I don't recall problems
> with the couple of times I've done Lilypond installs.

It just doesn't work. The commandline above, which is what the 
installer creates, does nothing. If I run lilypond.exe I get this 
error message:

ERROR: In procedure primitive-load-path:
ERROR: Unable to find file "ice-9/boot-9.scm" in load path

I am not interested in troubleshooting this. Nor could I find 
anything on their website, which seemed hopelessly confused between 
whether or not I needed to install CYGWIN or not. I appeared to me 
that previous versions required CYGWIN, and the current download 
version does not. I do not know if this is correct or not, because I 
can't find anything on the website that addresses it.

> > In short, I don't think Finale and Sibelius have anything to worry
> > about from these open source projects.
> 
> True; Lilypond has great output but the input side is severely
> lacking.  Although I must say, I for one would kill to have the kind
> of scriptability that I can perform with Lilypond available for either
> of those programs.

But that's the problem. A commandline interface does not lend itself 
to graphical manipulation. Commandline interfaces are procedural, 
GUIs are not.

As to Lilypond's output, I've seen it and, well, I'm not impressed. 
I'd consider it good enough to generate graphics of incipits for a 
catalog o a website, but not even close to usable for actual 
engraving of full scores. It's barely acceptable for keyboard music.

-- 
David W. Fenton                        http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates                http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc

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