Re: Video recording of LilyPond talk at Chemnitz

[Janek Warchoł]

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 8:23 PM, Tim Roberts <address@hidden> wrote:
> Janek Warchoł wrote:
>> Unfortunately, that's not going to happen soon.  Even small, local
>> publishers (i've asked some not long ago) are not interested in
>> anything else than Finale/Sibelius.  I predict that it will take 3-5
>> years before any major publisher begins using LilyPond, let alone
>> switching significant part of the production to it - they are just too
>> set in stone.
>
> That's really unfortunate, because the LilyPond format has some provable
> and very significant advantages over the Finale/Sibelius formats.  It's
> exactly the same situation as troff and LaTeX vs Word and InDesign.
> LilyPond, being a text format, can be diffed by source code control and
> configuration management tools.  With binary formats, all you can do is
> replace the file with the newer version.  You can't find the differences
> between versions, unless the vendor's tool happens to provide that feature.

Urs Liska has plans for making music publishers aware of these
advantages - see last messages from "Source management tools for
lilypond projects" thread:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2012-05/msg00561.html

> Further, binary formats "decay" over time.  If you had a document from
> Word 5 from 1992, I doubt very much that Word 2010 could even open it,
> and it would be hard to find a converter.  Because LilyPond is in
> human-readable text form, it can be read forever, and folks can write
> automated tools to update old versions to new formats.

Unfortunately not all changes in Lily syntax are handled by convert-ly
(updating script), so the situation is not as good as we would like it
to be.  Things should get much better after GLISS (Grand LilyPond
Input Syntax Standarization, expected this summer), though.

cheers,
Janek