Re: OT: Beauty of programming languages

[Jacques Menu]

63 years old, recently retired computer scientist, and an amateur double reed 
player after playing the double bass for some time.

Started with LP 2.12, across which I came looking for a LaTeX complement for 
producing scores.

After using TextMate on Mac OS X I switched to Frescobaldi some time ago. Quite 
happy with it, although the copy/paste/search/replace mechanism doesn’t behave 
as expected on a Mac. Maybe I’ll look into this one day.

My use of LP is mainly for my own needs to circumvent my reading limitations by 
producing better scores.
I also help friends in various contexts, such as creating a choir score with an 
added tenor voice in G clef for a singing girl-friend, or transposing for 
various instruments.

After some experiments, I’ve come to either scan scores with PhotoScore 
Ultimate (PU) and then go thru MusicXML to LP, or enter the LP syntax by hand 
if the original is too low quality. 

Before exporting as MusicXML, only the minimal stuff is worth doing with PU, 
such as checking keys, clefs and the number of notes/beats per bar, and moving 
some dynamics so as to attach them to the right notes.
In particular, fixing the slurs and number of rests in multirests can be 
avoided altogether, since the fixes are lost in the export. The bars numbers in 
comments and \barNumberCheck are fixed afterwards interactively if needed by a 
bash/sed script.

In one occasion, the LP code produced this way was rather messy, with a last 
staff being much too long to be displayed in PDF: importating the MusicXML into 
Finale 2014 and re-exporting it as MusicXML gave me a quite usable LP code. 
Sibelius 7.1.3 failed at this quite particular task… Working with those 
commercial tools is discouraging to me, too much mouse fine-tuning of details!

As to having other people move to LP, I’m conscious that text input won’t 
appeal to everybody, the leaning curve is steep indeed.

Thanks to all of you who contribute to LP development and user support: the 
latter is always fast and a most useful help!

JM


> Le 12 sept. 2015 à 21:51, Mats Bengtsson <address@hidden> a écrit :
> 
> 
>>> Martin Tarenskeen wrote:
>>>> This thread makes me wonder: what's the average age of LilyPond users
>>>> and developers?
> 
> 47! I've used LilyPond from the very first versions back in 1996. Actually,
> I first used the MPP (MusiXTeX PreProcessor) by Han-Wen and Jan and then
> started to test LilyPond as soon as it appeared. I contributed with some
> patches and lots of bug reports and later spent too much of my time
> supporting other LilyPond users on the mailing lists. Nowadays, I don't have
> any time to contribute to the development, but still use the program every
> now and then. 
> 
> In my profession, I'm an associate professor in Signal Processing. On my
> spare time, I'm an enthusiastic violin player, among others specializing in
> baroque music. My typesetting is mostly spent on preparing readable versions
> of more or less unreadable manuscripts, some occasional transpositions and
> simple arrangements, and finally to typeset songs that my daughters make up. 
> 
>   /Mats
> 
> 
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