Re: No fiddling claim

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Op zondag 27-09-2009 om 14:22 uur [tijdzone -0700], schreef Jonathan
Wilkes:

Hi Jonathan,

>      Not too long ago, I gave my opinion that "No fiddling" should be 
> changed to "less fiddling" for the new website.
>      After trying to do a quick exercise with a Schumann score, which I 
> posted here concerning a slur tweak after a line break, I don't think the 
> "less fiddling" claim is valid, either.

You seem to miss the point of the "no fiddling" remark.  

As an aside: this is exactly why I do not like the newly fumbled
"less fiddling", it turns people's heads into the direction of
fiddling.  People have come to think fiddling is normal and required.
More often than not it isn't.  We do not want less fiddling, we want
bug reports and no fiddling.  Okay... 

The idea of LilyPond is that the output should be beautiful without
fiddling.  While this may not have been achieved yet for some pieces of
music, it may be true next year.  We found that if you wanted 
beautifully engraved music, you would need to move almost every freaking
note, beam, barline, slur, accidental and lyric when using an expensive,
popular GUI program.

It may be that some tweaks, esp. where you need visible feedback
take more time to do in LilyPond than they do in a GUI program.
I don't think we particularly care about this.  The upside here
is that any tweaks you do need, can be quite easily improved
incrementally, saved for a next time, discussed on a mailing
list -- while mouse movements cannot.

If you want to help, please post a minimal snippet with the slur
or grace note that you do not like to the bug-lilypond list.

Jan.


-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
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