new lilypond user.

[V!ictor address@hidden]

Hello All,

I am a new and very grateful lilypond user. 
Just wanted to introduce myself and share my (short) lilypond discovery story:

I have been working with computers for some years now, doing mostly high level 
music structure (score-level data) processing. Very early on I realized that, 
because a good percentage of my musical data was already in the computer, it 
made no sense to read the data as numbers and put it back manually with a 
WYSIWYG music notation software such as Finale or Sibelius. Encoding the 
musical data in some format X (such as MusicXML) and importing it into one of 
these programs was not a solution, mainly because many of my musical ideas 
could not be completely notated with them. 
This took me to search for other alternatives: i looked at Score (which is, I 
believe, the standard tool for most professional music editors), worked a bit 
with MusiXTEX, PMX, but they all had limitations (some of very different type) 
that were not going to take me far. So I gave up on my search and decided to 
write my own music notation/engraver software. I worked on this project for 
about 4 months and got a primitive but working alpha version in December 2005. 
I was happy with it because, while the engraver still had no intelligence (no 
fancy spacing algorithms, collision detection, etc.) I could get it to do what 
I needed much better than with the popular commercial software. 
I had not talked with my good friend Trevor Baca for some time, and since we 
had talked about having alternative notation tools in the past, I told him 
about this project I was working on. Then he told me something like -"this is 
great, *but*, you should check out this new tool I'm using called Lilypond." 
Given my experience with the programs mentioned before, I was very skeptical. 
So, I gave him a series of "challenges" to solve with Lilypond that I knew were 
impossible or very convolved to solve in other notation/engraver tools. To my 
surprise, they were not only solvable in lily, but also trivial. I was 
immediately impressed. I studied the documentation for some days and the next 
thing that stroke me was the cleanness and clarity of the organization and 
structure of the program. After that, realizing Lily's versatility (almost 
everything is tweakable) made me a convert. I'm a bit sad that my own engraver 
code will have an early retirement, but given that Lily has the TeX paradigm of 
separating content from form (in this case, notation from engraving) I can 
still keep the notation-related part of my code :). 
 
So, thanks and congratulations to Han-Wen and Jan for this *fantastic* piece of 
software. 

You will be getting questions from me soon. 

Sincerely,

V!ctor Adan.