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Re: Too complicated and time consuming ...


From: Urs Liska
Subject: Re: Too complicated and time consuming ...
Date: Wed, 09 May 2012 00:12:07 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120430 Thunderbird/12.0.1

Am 08.05.2012 16:27, schrieb joannesmith:
Hello to all.
We are in the process of making our own hymn books (we use shape notes). We
have about 450 hymns that are in paper format right now (copied, pasted,
written on, sloppy, taped, marked, etc.) and I have the job of making them
all look nice. A friend suggested lilypond. I appreciate all that lilypond
can do, but I find that it is taking a painful amount of time!!!! The hymns
are not all the same ... and some are really complicated [for me anyway].
The easy ones only take me about 20 minutes or so, however the hard ones can
take more than 3 hours and some I have just given up on for now. Multiply
that by about 450 songs and it is really intimidating to me.

So my question ... maybe there is another program that will better suite my
needs?? Or maybe there is someone here that is really good at entering a
variety of hymns into lilypond and would be willing to help me every now and
then??? But I feel I am too needy ... I might need more help than what
someone is willing to give freely and I certainly do not have money to pay
anyone!!!

Of course I am hoping for a somewhat easier program ... clicking and
dragging sounds very appealing to me right now! Does any such program exist?

Thank you for your time.
I really can understand your situation. It hasn't been too long that I felt similarly - although I must admit (and this may be a big 'although') that I was fascinated from the beginning, not only of LilyPond's quality but also by the implications of the text based approach.

If I were you I would seriously consider giving LilyPond a try.
I know the learning curve is quite steep for a considerable amount of time. But if you are looking at 450 pieces this is a long way on which you should be able to get quite comfortable with LilyPond along the way.

Especially notable (IMHO) is LilyPond's power when you are talking about repetitive things like 450 comparable scores. Of course you will get your first scores faster with a graphical program. But with LilyPond you can for example set up a framework where you will only have to enter the plain music for each new hymn. If this framework is well thought out (OK, this isn't really trivial and may seem impossible for you at the moment), then you have a) a consistent layout throughout all your scores and b) can change any aspect of your layout or style at any moment practically without any hassle and have this reflected in all your scores (for example, besides general style decisions you can switch between completely different layouts or part collections (individual parts, conductor's vs. pocket score etc.) simply through commenting out single lines of code).

The LilyPond community won't do the work for you and can't relieve you from learning. But if you are willing to learn and ask the right questions you will surely experience good will and considerable expertise on this list (I can really tell you that :-) )

HTH
Urs



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