Re: How do new users feel about LilyPond's documentation?

[Simon Albrecht]

Hello,

I recall that I was always thinking it would be best to have a person at hand, maybe even sharing a ‘bureau’, who could answer my question. Or attending a class, in which one would for example be guided in coding example scores, and receive immediate feedback. Later I realised that I might have saved much time asking on the ly-user list, of which I somehow only got wind after some time. But these wishes are of course far from reality: we may only dream of a future in which every university music student or even pupils at music schools would be taught basics of lilypond as a standard tool, similar perhaps to the use of LaTeX in maths and physics…
Anyway, reading together everything on the internet from very extensive resources has been really cumbersome, especially as I hadn’t done it before or known the way to do this.
Now that’s only a report of my experience. I’d have to make some thorough thoughts on how this might have been eased.

Yours, Simon

PS. But in the course of years, I got the grip and now I get along pretty well :-) Though, it’s a never-ending way, if one goes on delving into scheme and the source and the docs and contributing etc. etc. … But rewarding it is.

Am 22.04.2015 um 17:09 schrieb Abraham Lee:

All,

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, even going so far as to create my own "Quick Start" tutorials for new users, but I can only go so far in my own head. I really have two questions that I keep wondering about:

1. What is the thing you (especially new users) like the least about LilyPond's documentation structure?
2. If you could have the same documentation structure as found in another notation program, which program is it? Or put another way: Is there a notation program out there that has a documentation structure you like?
   

I'm asking this because I'm trying to determine how we in the 'Pond can make it easier for new users to jump in with both feet instead of dipping a toe and getting scared of the deep.

I may be over-thinking this, but I keep getting the feeling that people are scared of using LilyPond partially because the documentation, though deep and detailed, is a little too deep and technical for new users who are familiar with a GUI program and less familiar with programming.

Any thoughts? I think I'm mostly interested in comments related to the *Learning* and *Notation* manuals, but comments about the others are welcome, too.

I can't say that I'm proposing any massive changes to the documentation, but I'd like to know if there's something else that would be more new user-friendly.

- Abraham

_______________________________________________
lilypond-user mailing list
address@hidden
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user