Re: Video recording of LilyPond talk at Chemnitz

[David Kastrup]

Tim Roberts <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.

The same could be said for MusicXML.  LilyPond is human readable.  And,
for better or worse, it is programmable.

> 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.

I am pretty sure XML-based formats will decay as well, text or not.
LilyPond, of course, also decays, but being human-readable, it still
preserves information that has a chance of getting recovered.

-- 
David Kastrup