Re: critical issues

[James]

Hello,

2012/1/8 Łukasz Czerwiński <address@hidden>:

> What's the aim of Lilypond?

err..

"LilyPond is a music engraving program, devoted to producing the
highest-quality sheet music possible. It brings the aesthetics of
traditionally engraved music to computer printouts."

> And why isn't it competing with Finale and
> Sibellius? Aren't all three programs "making PDF files with music"? Of
> course Finale and Sibellius have some other functionalities, but the common
> one is related to PDFs.
> Every computer program and in fact every thing or machine have a "most
> common user". How would you describe a most common user of Lilypond? How
> does he/she use Lilypond, what kind of music (and how complex) does they
> (re-)write? What annoys or disturbs them most in Lilypond?

I keep re-reading this and I just think you want a nice
point-and-click GUI. I don't know what else it is you seem to want
apart from to say LilyPond is 'better' than Sibelius/Finale' in some
vague and probably meaningless way.

Sibelius and Finale cost hundreds of pounds, LilyPond is free, there
is no 'competition'. The output of LP in 99% of cases is much better
out of the box than any of those packages can manage - I know, I have
to sit in my orchestra and read the crud that comes out of the Sib/Fib
stuff.

I can use LilyPond on all the 3 platforms (MacOS, Windows and Linux)
that I use, without any problems at all, move files between the two.
I can use any editor I choose (again important when using 3 different
platforms), the files I use are easily read on *any* version of
LilyPond and apart from the odd complex syntax change of which we have
a simple script to help (convert-ly) I don't have to worry much about
forward incompatibility. There is no typical user, that is a myth as I
am sure it is the same in Sib/Fib.

If you are talking about MIDI output, LilyPond was never intended for
that, it's nice that we have some 'relatively ok' capabilities (no
offence to the MIDI coders - I rarely use MIDI anyway) but all the
Sib/Fib people I know don't use MIDI either, but there are much much
better (and free) tools to produce midi output than Sib/Fib anyway.

if yuo haven't already then I suggest you read

http://lilypond.org/freedom.html

http://lilypond.org/reviews.html

http://lilypond.org/essay.html

Pretty much says it all.

> Let's assume that I would like to help in developing Lilypond, but I don't
> have my own idea, what part of it I could improve. What would you suggest me
> to do?

Start by looking here:

http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/list?can=2&q=&sort=priority&colspec=ID&x=type&y=priority&mode=grid&cells=tiles

Take your pick!

>
>
>> If everybody does it in his own local way, it is more a distraction than
>> anything else.  "How does one do x in LilyPond?" "Depends on whether you
>> are talking about functionality written by Mike, David, Han-Wen, Jan,
>> Graham, Carl or Werner".  That's not what a user wants to hear.
>
> Are there some guidelines how to write new code to work in the same manner
> as the already written code?

Start here:

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.15/Documentation/contributor/summary-for-experienced-developers

Else:

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.15/Documentation/contributor/help-us

> If no, is there a person (several people?) that
> could answer such questions?

address@hidden


-- 
--

James