On 31.07.2009, at 21:18, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
I made my first lilypond score for more than one instrument, and I
thought I'd give some comments on some of the things that were really
difficult from a beginner's perspective. I think it would be helpful to
have a section in the LM on "migrating from Finale/Sibelius", or a
separate document, if there isn't one already.
I'm sure some of the following issues will become easier for me once I
go through the docs again and do some more projects, but I imagine other
first time users might run into some of these, so here are my
"first project" experiences.
Which documentation? Much is explained in the Learning Manual, the frst thing anyone starting with LilyPond (or LilyPondTool) should read.
slurs - I had a lot of "cannot end slur" problems early on, evidently
because I was trying to end a slur in a different voice (which isn't a
problem in Finale). Also, longer slurs ( more than a measure ) were often
a little flat: the middle of the slur would get way too close to a notehead, tie, or something else. Since there are so many settings for
slurs, I didn't have time to figure out how to do a global override to
make them more curvy.
This is introduced in the Learning Manual, section 3.2. Voices contain music.
internals reference- I found myself going into the internals reference
way too often. Of course this is a good thing in order to gain more
control over one's score, but a lot of it was wasting time, for example:
spending 10 minutes to build and test a macro to flip a tuplet position
when \tupletUp & \tupletDown already exist.
I'll keep this in mind the next time through the docs, and see if there's
something I overlooked, or that is missing, about the built in commands.
Pedagogically, btw, I think these macros are great. If someone who uses
Finale sees "\slurUp d( e)", it's pretty easy to comprehend that "Hey,
that's basically the same as selecting a slur with the mouse and using
ctrl-f to flip it up. And no mousing!" Whereas seeing:
\once \override Slur #'direction = #UP d( e)
means "dear lord, I have to learn a programming language just to move
a slur? No thank you."
The easy way of moving things above or below a staff, namely with ^ or _ is explained in the Learning Manual section 2.2. Single staff notation And although it isn't completley clear that it can be applied to more than just articulations, a little curious experimenation proves that it is possible.
spacing - basically, if there is a macro just to nudge a note column to
the left or right, and to turn on some kind of piano staff dynamic spacing so dynamics are placed in the middle, I think that would make it so that
overrides are only necessary for more "advanced" stuff.
There are many options for these kinds of adjustments: the multi-voice adjustments are explained in the Learning Manual in section 3.2 Voices contain music, anything more complex is introduced in section 4.5 Collisions of objects. As regards piano centered dynamics, there is a template for piano centered dynamics in the Snippets List, conveniently named.
\mark - This is really handy. Would be cool if spanners could be used
with \mark so accel., rit., a tempo, etc., could be used.
Is the current usage of \startTextSpan and \stopTextSpan somehow deficient?
resizing staff/score - since layout-set-staff-size does not
resize the distance between staff lines, what's the best way to, say,
make the pianostaff larger than the other instruments?
This isn't explained until the Notation Reference, section 1.6.2 Modifying single staves.
It sounds like you've got a great hold on lilypond, and I hope that you continue to use it and learn more. A couple of read-throughs of the Learning Manual to familiarize yourself with the various existing options, and you should find using LilyPond a lot easier, although I must say, if you can construct your own macro, you're far better off than a lot of us.