Re: Sponsoring lilypond development Was Re: Score parts: instrument and duration

[Trevor Baca]

On 8/18/05, Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> wrote:
> Erik Sandberg wrote:
> > I think we're talking about different things: you're talking about how to
> > convince them, I just suggested what we could try to learn by talking to
> > them.
> 
> Certainly; however, learning how to engrave is not a top prority for me.
> I usually just stare at well engraved scores. Also, SCORE users tend to
> answer with comments like "You need to use ZX command P17 set to 23".

Right. This is actually another benefit of Lily over SCORE: all of
Lily's parameters are *NAMED* rather than magic numbers (well, almost
all: could someone please get rid of -1, 1 for "up" and "down"? ;-),
and ALL of SCORE's parameters are magic numbers.

AFAIK, key-value pairs didn't exist in the late 70s when Leland
started development (or maybe they did; anyway, they didn't make it
into the program).

To use SCORE you literally have to memorize that p2 means "staff
number", p3 means "horizontal position", p4 means "start vertical
position", p5 might mean "glyph size as a percentage of default", etc.
But all SCORE users do this and, once you do it's no problem. As H-W
points out, the problem is that the conversation on the score list is
inscrutible to outsiders (unless you have a hardcopy of the SCORE user
manual).

Trevor.