Re: Video recording of LilyPond talk at Chemnitz

[Tim Roberts]

Janek Warchoł wrote:
> Unfortunately, that's not going to happen soon.  Even small, local
> publishers (i've asked some not long ago) are not interested in
> anything else than Finale/Sibelius.  I predict that it will take 3-5
> years before any major publisher begins using LilyPond, let alone
> switching significant part of the production to it - they are just too
> set in stone.

That's really unfortunate, because the LilyPond format has some provable
and very significant advantages over the Finale/Sibelius formats.  It's
exactly the same situation as troff and LaTeX vs Word and InDesign. 
LilyPond, being a text format, can be diffed by source code control and
configuration management tools.  With binary formats, all you can do is
replace the file with the newer version.  You can't find the differences
between versions, unless the vendor's tool happens to provide that feature.

Further, binary formats "decay" over time.  If you had a document from
Word 5 from 1992, I doubt very much that Word 2010 could even open it,
and it would be hard to find a converter.  Because LilyPond is in
human-readable text form, it can be read forever, and folks can write
automated tools to update old versions to new formats.

-- 
Tim Roberts, address@hidden
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.