Re: FW: Professional ???

[Mats Bengtsson]

> > - lily handles conventional notation reasonably, but degrades very
> > quickly as soon as esoteric needs arise.  Don't ever try to enter a
> > Boulez or Stockhausen score without expecting to need psychiatric
> > care!
> 
> Probably.  We've heard this before, but it doesn't help.  You should
> try to request a specific feature or notation that you really need.

It's also a matter of flexibility. The design philosophy in
Lilypond is to understand and support every notation feature
in order to automatically provide a beautiful result. This is
mostly great but is also a problem when a particular feature
is not supported. Even though the basic implementation
architecture is very flexible and gets more and more flexible,
it still requires a fairly large effort to implement a new
feature unless you're well acquainted with the inner workings
of Lilypond.

> > - For undetermined reason, I have not been able to get multimeasure
> > rests outside of a trivial example, critical for extraction of
> > individual parts.  I seem to be following the documentation/examples
> > but the behavior is not consistent and 10 minute compiles are not
> > conducive to experimentation.
> 
> You are aware of the skipBars property?  See
> input/test/multi-measure-rest.ly.

Also, the support for multimeasure rests has been buggy in
some versions. Maybe Jeff has been unlucky.

> > - changing the paper/font size is horribly braindead.
> 
> This should have been fixed in later releases.
> 
> > Landscape rotation likewise.
> 
> Ly2dvi has got a --landscape option.  You'll probably have to set the
> linewidth by hand.  This should not be hard.

Actually, the --landscape flag does not have any affect
in the current lilypond versions. It's one of these 
small problems I've noticed and then forgot before
I got the time to fix them. 

> > - getting the symbol c1. to span two measures of 6/8 time seems to
> >   be impossible.
> 
> For two measures of 6/8, you probably need to enter something like
> c1*12/8

??? What's the problem with \time 6/8; c1. ? (I'll try it 
when I get home.)

> > with rehearsal marks is absolutely necessary when handing parts to
> > human players.
> 
> Is there a problem with rehearsal marks?

There was in some versions but is solved in the latest versions
as fas as I know. 

However, one general problem is that there are some broken
features in every patch level. It's easy to say that 
1.2.17 is extremely old and recommend people to use a
more recent version. However, I don't know exactly which 
1.3.xx version to recommend since the answer will depend
on which features they want to use. 
I've mentioned this earlier and know that it'd be easy
to create a "Broken features" list in WikiWiki.

Still I appreciate that you improve the inner workings of
Lilypond but sometimes it feels that there are too many
experimental patch levels inbetween the stable ones.

Keep up with the good work, I'm looking forward to a
stable 1.4.0.

    /Mats