wikipedia...

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Hi there,

Triggered by recent wikipedia messages, I had a peek at our 

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilypond

page and found it still has the weird (long and not very
impressive) fire breathers example.  Why the .ly at all,
better show impressive output and move .ly example
to a LilyPond_Language page?

Also, there are some  pieces by Han-Wen from 2006 on the talk
page

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:GNU_LilyPond

quotes below.  Can someone other than Han-wen or me take care of this?

Possibly it's no wonder that wikipedia doesn't use lilypond,
considering that our article on wikipedia is so bad?

Greetings,
Jan.


     Hi,

     I take issue with


         While it has achieved this, the quality of output from
         competing commercial packages has improved since the
         inception of the LilyPond project so that they are now
         comparable

     because it implies that LilyPond can be considered "done" from a
     typographical POV (which it isn't,
     IMO). Furthermore, "comparable" is a vague statement: mosquitos
     and elephants are comparable, and the result of the comparison
     is that the elefant is bigger. Esthetics aren't well defined,
     but most printout of Finale and Sibelius still (we're speaking
     2006) looks made with a computer.

     I think I am not the right person to edit the page itself, though.
     Han-Wen (LilyPond Author).

and also

    I don't own licenses to either Finale or Sibelius, so I can't
    provide you with any specific samples, but I've seen both in
    action. I think that pointing out weaknesses of other
    packages should not be done on the LilyPond page, but rather
    on the pages of said packages. I think it's better to point
    out what sets apart Lily, as this is more informative and
    more objective, eg

        * optical scaling for font: depending on staff size, the
          design of the font is altered slightly. (This is a
          Feature that Knuth's Comupter Modern font is well known
          for too): note heads become rounder, and lines heavier.

        * Optical spacing (see the essay), where stem directions
          are taken into account for spacing subsequent
          notes. Note that this is something different from the
          inaccurately named Optical (tm) Spacing feature of
          Sibelius.

        * Proportional spacing, where allotted space is exactly
          equal to durations. No other packages support this out
          of the box. (you need a recent 2.7 lily, though)

        * Ledger lines that never collide, but are shortened in tight 
situations.

        * Stem directions on the center follow the directions of surrounding 
notes. (recent 2.7)

    Also, in general, LilyPond does much better on automatically
    avoiding collisions for ties, slurs, articulation marks,
    nested tuplets, etc.. For example, if you add an arpeggio to
    a chord in Finale, Finale just parks it on top of the
    accidentals, you have to manually tweak things to look ok.

    Han-Wen

Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
Avatar®: http://AvatarAcademy.nl    | http://lilypond.org