> HowardGilbert wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I appologise if mentioning Lilypond on this list is heresy.
> >
> > I'd be most interested to hear from anyone who's tried it (preferably using
> > unix/Linux OS) giving a brief outline of it's pros & cons versus PMX - MusiXTeX.
>
> My lilypond experience doesn't exceed my activity as the maintainer of
> the lilypond musical terms glossary and the typesetting of a few scores.
> I would tend to conclude that among the pros are the independency of
> some MusiXTeX and/or pmx limitations (e.g. max number of staves per
> score and xtuplets with equal length notes only). Among the cons are
> very limited typesetter influence on number of pages/staves and
> linebreaks. An important difference is that while musixtex and friends
> are relatively stable and reliable lilypond for a long time has been
> under heavy development. That is not said to blame lilypond the scope of
> which is broader than the typesetting aspect. Personally I find the
> scripting of a lilypond score much more complicated than that of a
> mtx/pmx score. To me an mtx source file is much 'closer' to the
> resulting score than a lilypond ditto and thus more easy to proof read
> and correct.
>
> When it comes to evaluating the quality of the typesetting result I
> don't think it would be fair to state pros and cons because that depends
> on your personal taste. Personally I like the overall graphic look of
> MusiXTeX/pmx a little better than that of lilypond.
> --
> Christian Mondrup, Computer Programmer
> Scandiatransplant, Skejby Hospital, University Hospital of Aarhus
> Brendstrupgaardsvej, DK 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark
> Phone: +45 89 49 53 01
I'm biased the other way. I have used Lilypond quite much
but several years have passed since I used MusiXTeX the
last time. However, I do follow the mutex list and have
at least gathered some idea of the capabilities of the
MusiXTeX family of tools.
Adding to Christian's answer, you can insert line breaks
in a Lilypond wherever you wish, but by default, Lilypond
will determine the number of bars per line automatically
to give the best possible note spacing. What you cannot
do in Lilypond is to specify the total number of output
lines.
When it comes to the input syntax, I like the Lilypond
idea of writing each part separately, instead of
PMX and M-Tx syntax where you specify all parts
jointly for a block of bars. This also means that it's
easier to typeset the same music in different versions,
not only extracting separate parts of a score but, e.g.
to change the order of some parts, to write a clarinet
part as it sounds in the score but as it's played in the
parts. For proof reading, it's often most useful to
listen to a MIDI file which can easily be generated with
Lilypond, but that feature has recently been added also
to PMX. However, the basic idea of describing music in
an ASCII format is very similar in for all the tools,
you have to get used to the details of the syntax, but
then it's no major problem whichever system you chose.
For the output quality, take a look at some MusiXTeX
scores at http://www.gmd.de/Misc/Music/scores/Welcome.html
and compare to some Lilypond scores at
http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/ (look at the more recent
contributions, the layout has changed somewhat between the
different Lilypond versions). The fonts are different, but
I think both Lilypond and MusixTeX offer nicer fonts than
many commercial programs. For songs, Lilypond calculates the
exact length of each syllable and adjusts the note spacing
accordingly.
When it comes to flexibility, MusixTeX gives (in principle)
full flexibility to fine-tune the output, even though this
may require some inline TeX code in you preprocessor file
or even a manual edition of the generated MusiXTeX code.
Also, this may require good knowledge about TeX.
For Lilypond, the idea is that you should describe the
music, not the exact layout. Of course, in some situations
you do want to change the default layout. Many things
can be changed with different property settings and in
recent versions, there's also a possibility to manually
affect the exact position of almost any graphical object,
but that should only be used in exceptional cases.
When it comes to support, the documentation of Lilypond
is not always up to date, but there's a large set of
example files which illustrate most of the features.
For all the programs, you have very helpful mailing
lists that can provide tips and tricks. Also, you
can often get a new feature implemented within a
week or two, both for the MusiXTeX tools and Lilypond.
/Mats
