Dear LilyPond users, I have found the recent debate about the difficulty of using LilyPond interesting and would like to offer my experience, as someone who has been using it for about six months. I apologise if this is a bit long.
For the most part I use LilyPond to do musical examples, for theory classes I teach at University, and for my forthcoming thesis. In general I have been able to figure out solutions to most problems I encounter, inspite of the fact that LilyPond is not very kind when you try to reduce lots of music to two staves and then cover it with annotations so someone else can understand it. Finale and Sibelius are much easier for editorial stuff than LilyPond, but they don't look nearly as good, so I'm determined to persevere. In this past week I was asked to do the typesetting for a forthcoming book which will be about 40% musical examples (I have done typesetting for books before, in Finale, with which I am fairly proficient). Naturally this was an opportunity to sell LilyPond (especially since Finale or Sibelius scores look worse and worse as they get smaller). I sent the editor a link to the LilyPond 'essay' and she was sold enough to consider it even though it may take more time. As a test I did one full page of examples in LilyPond (of which there will be maybe 90 in total in the book), and it was inhumanly difficult. Having to produce another (dead) author's idiosyncrasies without licence to compromise is hard in any software, but I have to say it was much tougher in LilyPond than Finale, where one can simply drag things around. The result is that the editor is, at the time of writing, reconsidering Finale (which is a shame - in a book with so much music LilyPond would make a real positive difference, but the battle is not lost yet). Sibelius is the software taught in the University here, but the recent shenanigans involving Avid, and the rise in the culture of BYOD and open source, have put the staff off continuing with it. I have some influence, and was asked about LilyPond, but I could not recommend it (my view was to wait for MuseScore 2.0), mainly since it is not well-suited to either of the two most common activities for this software by students: doing musical examples for essays or other homework, and composing (hitting a play button, changing a note you don't like and hitting play again; hearing sampled instruments without having to export to other software etc.). I don't know what to say about these things - the former can be helped, but perhaps not the latter. Either way, LilyPond's capacity to change is surely not something to be negative about. And the best way to effect it is probably through this mailing list. Perhaps I am a niche user who's interests will not make their way into the programme. The saving grace for me will be the mailing list. In the last two days I asked two questions; one had two answers within a matter of two hours, and the other was answered in an astonishing 17 minutes (my thanks to David and Harm) - try getting that kind of helpfulness from a company who's product you have bought! You don't have to be one of the power users to benefit. Kevin _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user