Re:Problem with remove bar number/ why I'm not upgrading to the new stable version

[Kevin Patrick Barry]

Dear LilyPond users,

I have found the recent debate about the difficulty of using LilyPond
interesting and would like to offer my experience, as someone who has
been using it for about six months.  I apologise if this is a bit
long.

For the most part I use LilyPond to do musical examples, for theory
classes I teach at University, and for my forthcoming thesis.  In
general I have been able to figure out solutions to most problems I
encounter, inspite of the fact that LilyPond is not very kind when you
try to reduce lots of music to two staves and then cover it with
annotations so someone else can understand it.  Finale and Sibelius
are much easier for editorial stuff than LilyPond, but they don't look
nearly as good, so I'm determined to persevere.

In this past week I was asked to do the typesetting for a forthcoming
book which will be about 40% musical examples (I have done typesetting
for books before, in Finale, with which I am fairly proficient).
Naturally this was an opportunity to sell LilyPond (especially since
Finale or Sibelius scores look worse and worse as they get smaller).
I sent the editor a link to the LilyPond 'essay' and she was sold
enough to consider it even though it may take more time.  As a test I
did one full page of examples in LilyPond (of which there will be
maybe 90 in total in the book), and it was inhumanly difficult.
Having to produce another (dead) author's idiosyncrasies without
licence to compromise is hard in any software, but I have to say it
was much tougher in LilyPond than Finale, where one can simply drag
things around.  The result is that the editor is, at the time of
writing, reconsidering Finale (which is a shame - in a book with so
much music LilyPond would make a real positive difference, but the
battle is not lost yet).

Sibelius is the software taught in the University here, but the recent
shenanigans involving Avid, and the rise in the culture of BYOD and
open source, have put the staff off continuing with it.  I have some
influence, and was asked about LilyPond, but I could not recommend it
(my view was to wait for MuseScore 2.0), mainly since it is not
well-suited to either of the two most common activities for this
software by students: doing musical examples for essays or other
homework, and composing (hitting a play button, changing a note you
don't like and hitting play again; hearing sampled instruments without
having to export to other software etc.).  I don't know what to say
about these things - the former can be helped, but perhaps not the
latter.

Either way, LilyPond's capacity to change is surely not something to
be negative about.  And the best way to effect it is probably through
this mailing list.  Perhaps I am a niche user who's interests will not
make their way into the programme.  The saving grace for me will be
the mailing list.  In the last two days I asked two questions; one had
two answers within a matter of two hours, and the other was answered
in an astonishing 17 minutes (my thanks to David and Harm) - try
getting that kind of helpfulness from a company who's product you have
bought!  You don't have to be one of the power users to benefit.

Kevin