Re: Lilypond lobbying?

[Janek Warchoł]

2011/8/22 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
> I tend to tackle complex programming problems on paper first.  According
> to your rationale, this is unreasonable as the goal is to run them on a
> computer.  But paper better facilitates me thinking about the problem.
>
> When I think of a melody, one reflex is to scribble it down.  Often this
> is just dots on some lines, never mind the durations, stems, beams,
> whatever.  Lilypond is close to scribbling as you don't need to look at
> what you are typing.  With a WYSIWYG program, you are aiming, you are
> thinking, you are arranging visually.  That's disruptive.
>
> When I am composing, I want to think as little as possible about what
> stuff will look like, or I lose focus.  Lilypond is a help.  Stuff does
> not usually look right at first try, but that's not important.  Making
> things look right is something I can do when I no longer need to focus
> on the music itself.
>
>> I wouldn't stand it if i knew for sure that LilyPond would never be
>> accepted in the professional market.
>
> The end product is something that can be typed off if necessary, and
> that's not my concern.  I recently wrote an article about chromatic
> button accordions with LaTeX and Lilypond-book, and sent the PDF.  They
> wanted Word files, so I converted some using LaTeX2RTF and prepared SVG
> graphics (of the notes) and JPG (of the pictures) and messed around a
> few days trying to get them unmolested into OpenOffice (hint: OpenOffice
> does not import scalable graphics in any interchange format), having to
> give up finally and sending the SVG separately.  The editor managed to
> work with that, and in spite of using the stuff at quite different
> scales, there were no artifacts anywhere.  I actually was rather
> expecting to see some 72dpi JPG-based staircasing or whatever in spite
> of the work I put in, but at least it would not have been my fault.  So
> this was a mess and additional work.
>
> But would I have written this thing using Word (and/or Finale?) or
> OpenOffice from the start?  No way.  I can't work with that stuff.  It's
> completely alien to my way of thinking.  And a steaming heap of
> faltering crap, to boot.  Whenever I actually work with some
> "industry-leading" software, I am consistently totally thrown
> off-balance by seeing a heap of user-unfriendly totally unintuitive
> incoherent crap for which it is almost impossible to figure out how to
> do things _properly_ (poking them with a stick until they look as though
> they did is comparatively easy, but I can't do things that way without
> getting ulcers).  If there is a way at all.
>
> I don't get it what makes people pick market leading software.  My
> normal stance when I have never touched them is something like "I know
> my own tools are peculiar, but I am familiar with them.  I am certain
> one could do things well-structured and in a user-friendly manner with
> that commercial software, but I don't bother, since I got my workflow
> reasonably set up using my peculiar tools".  And eveerybody uses this
> software, so it must be reasonably usable.  And when I actually have to
> do something with it, it is an incoherent, opaque, unstable crashing
> pile of crap that does nothing right.
>
> It's like "Ok, I know it needs skills to have a TeX/LaTeX/Lilypond
> workflow where no degradation of graphics and text quality occurs
> anywhere in the processing chain, but I have learnt how to treat each
> case, the hard way.  This is a dinosaur, after all".  So I take an
> uptodate current professional market leading tool, and it blows it.  And
> people are used to and happy with it blowing it.  And you look in the
> support forums, and people know it is blowing it, but don't really mind.
>
> So no, I don't care what tools will be used for putting my ideas to the
> final paper form.  Anybody who does not like my tools can type them off
> again for all I care.  Since they are professional editors, they'll be
> finished faster than I could do this.

These are some very interesting thoughts, David!
The difference in our opinions comes from the difference in our jobs.
You are a composer, i'm a typesetter - all my opinions were given from
a music typesetter's point of view: i have something finished to work
with, my job is to choose best layout options.  You begin with nothing
and create everything, you work on a higher level of abstraction - in
this case i don't doubt that keyboard input and no WYSIWYG are very
valuable to you!
And yes, the amount of sucking in "professional software" is shocking!

cheers,
Janek