Re: Sibelius user looking for the easiest way to learn LilyPond

[Antonio Gervasoni]

Nick Paine writes:

> If you have a whole passage of tuplets, then... 
> \set tupletSpannerDuration = #(ly:make-moment 1 4) 
> \times 2/3 { <your passage of tuplets> } 
> no need to repeat the \times 2/3 {} for each tuplet.

Werner Lemberg writes:

> And with a small music function like 
> T = #(define-music-function (parser location music) (ly:music?) 
>       #{ \times 2/3 $music #})   
> you can say \T { ... } instead of \times 2/3 { ... }

Excelent, but I would say that only musicians who are also programmers and
with a good knowledge of Scheme might be able to figure out such solutions.
I know a lot of musicians and none of them has programming skills. I fear
this makes Lilypond available to an even narrower number of people than I
ever thought before.

Jan Nieuwenhuizen writes:

> That's why I like to differentiate between inputting and tweaking. 
> Inputting is probably much, much faster using the keyboard.  As LilyPond 
> grows more mature, the idea is that the number of tweaks necessary goes 
> down.  I'm quite happy that users still choose to us LilyPond even if 
> for many production quality scores tweaks are still needed. 

There is one reason: software like Sibelius and Finale need even more tweaks
than Lilypond! When using Sibelius I'm constantly making tweaks to the
output. It is almost unconscious (like stick shift when driving) but I've
recently become more aware of this. Of course, these tweaks can be done
pretty fast, but the number of them per minute is amazing, and many have to
be constantly repeated as the score keeps changing while inputting.

> I'm still not sure what the ideal way of inputting and tweaking would 
> look like.  The nice thing about text-based tweaks as compared to 
> GUI-based tweaks, is that text-based tweaks can be saved, documented, 
> reused, shared and improved; whereas GUI tweaks often can't.

A very good point! Just like in Linux, where solutions to problems are
always in the form of terminal commands so that they also can nbe documented
and shared between users.

I hope the number of tweaks will get reduced with every new version of
Lilypond, but for that to happen more musicians (composers especially) have
to use Lilypond, so that they can report odd behaviour or bugs when they
write their own music. 

How can this be achieved I don't know, but muy guess is that some syntax
simplification is needed or maybe some software, like Frescobaldi, needs to
evolve to a point where musicians with no programming skills are also able
to use Lilypond and write very complex pieces with the aid of the software
itself or with plugins created by users.

Antonio



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