RE: Time

[Bertalan Fodor]

I am/was a quite experienced Finale user. It took me half year to
'master' it. Now I'm getting to be quite experienced with LilyPond, too
(after more than a half year). 

I think that the most time-consuming process in Lily is tweaking the
output. And tweaking is usually not avoidable.  However, if I finish my
plugin for jEdit it will contain a Code Assist that will make tweaking
much faster and easier.

So, nowadays.

To measure the time I must separate two activities:
Writing the score. - This is usually less than in Finale. One page -
less than one hour. I use the jEdit's plugin's document wizard to set up
the score, and it makes it much faster and error free.
Tweaking the output. - This is always much more than in Finale.

If you have to do something you haven't before it can be very time
consuming.

I think complex music is much faster with Finale, but LilyPond's nicer
output may worth the time.

And one more: using point-and-click is a must.

One of the worst and hardest things in LilyPond is that you must use
your brain very much, not just your eyes and hands, so you quickly can
get tired.

Bert