Re: FW: Professional ???

[Christian Mondrup]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:

> As you observed yourself, current lilypond input is not well suited
> for composing and we (seem to) have a different whishlist than a
> contemporary composer might have.
> 
> However, I think this has more to do with focus and pragmatism, rather
> than philosophy: we want to do well at typesetting, so we concentrate
> on that.
> 
> Also, the problem of composing on the computer hasn't been solved.
> Maybe GUIs can bring a solution, some day.  You tried using a
> spreadsheet (you should have used Gnumeric :-).  Maybe a smart emacs
> mode could help.

In my opinion composing on the computer does not necessarily require a
gui interface. What I personally prefer in that context is rather a way
of entering music lines in a source file resembling the order of the
staff lines in the real, resulting score. However according my limited
experience with lily typesetting tells this is a not an appropriate
method for editing lily sources. Hence I have until recently been using
the MusiXTeX pre-pre-processor M-Tx for that purpose and reserved lily
for dedicated typesetting. 

Even if it might be slightly off-topic I would like to share my very
positive experience with the shareware sheet note editor Mup
(http://www.arkkra.com) that offers excellent features for composing
like I want to do it. The quality of the resulting postscript scores and
MIDI files is more than good the modest price $29 taken into account.
That applies to the support level as well. For composers of avant-garde
music not wanting to spend huge amounts on high end commercial software
Mup may be an obvious typesetting choice since it offers access to line-
and curve drawing commands needed for some branches of contemporary
notation.

This is not meant as an encouragement to drop lily! I highly appreciate
the efforts put into the lily-development and the results of it.

Regards
-- 
Christian Mondrup, Computer Programmer
Scandiatransplant, Skejby Hospital, University Hospital of Aarhus
Brendstrupgaardsvej, DK 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark
Phone: +45 89 49 53 01