Some general comments

[Ian Hawthorn]

I've been using lilypond to write arrangements for my vocal group.
I've done about 5 arrangements this way. I'm generally very happy
with lilypond. It does many difficult things with surprisingly little
fuss, is quick and easy to use, and produces marvellous output in
most cases. Conversely however many things that should be easy
seem to be an absolute nightmare to encode.

Things are easy when I can simply use a template like the SATB
template. This allows me to concentrate on entering notes and
words and as the syntax for entry of notes and lyrics is very
straightforward, everything works well. However whenever
I reach a point in the music where certain `structural events' take
place then encoding becomes an absolute nightmare. For examples
of structural events consider.

1. An extra lyric line is needed for harmony parts for a few bars.

2. An extra staff and lyric line for a soloist is required for one section.

3. The lyrics for one section need to be aligned to a different part
than they are in the rest of the piece.

4. This part of the song is repeated and needs extra lyric lines for
two extra verses.

5. This bit of the song is in unison and needs only one staff.

There are workarounds for these things I know, some in the
documentation and some in the examples or discussed in this forum.
But they are NOT easy to use and here is why.

To an arranger these are simple events which happen at a
particular time and which you'd like to deal with via a simple
command at the point where they happen

"start up a new staff at this point for a soloist"
"stop the staff for the solist because the solo part is done"
"set these lyrics to the bass notes instead of the soprano notes"
"split the lyric line at this point because this bit of the song has two 
verses"
"introduce a lyric line above the staff for the descant in this bit of 
the song"

To lilypond however these are not simple events but global structural
changes which require a complete rewriting of the overall structural
description of the entire piece. The SATB template itself needs to be
rewritten. The happy process of entering notes and words is drastically
interrupted as I muck around with variable declarations renaming whole
sections of song and struggle with the difficult syntax required to change
the structural description to get what I want to happen in the right order,
all lined up the way it should be.

I've been thinking about how to improve matters from a usability
perspective and I do have some suggestions. But this is long enough
already and I'd first be interested to hear the experiences of others.