Re: Supporting my work on LilyPond financially

[Urs Liska]

Am 01.12.2013 09:45, schrieb David Kastrup:
> > This means that the first hurdle is overcoming the inertia of "I
> > > already have x, why should I switch? Which leads to (2) even if I can
> > > demonstrate that LP overcomes the technical difficulties of another
> > > notation program, people are going to be reluctant to switch because
> > > of the perceived difficulty of learning LP syntax or working without
> > > the UI bells and whistles of Finale, etc.
> Which is a reason to teach them working with Frescobaldi, "not"
> LilyPond.  Teaching LilyPond is like teaching blueprints to carpenters.
> In the end, they know exactly what the blueprint means and where each
> cut has to be placed, but they never got to touch a saw.
>
> When that fails, try getting them hooked on Denemo first as an
> entry-level drug potentially leaving to raw LilyPond use at a later
> stage.

Lacking spare time today I can only hook in sporadically into this 
important discussion.

I think it hasn't been stressed enough yet that the text input by itself 
is a huge hurdle. I mean, not the syntax but the plain fact.
If you're looking at a real-world score's input file it's overwhelmingly 
daunting. And if you look at { c d e f g } like examples they aren't at 
all overwhelming.
Most people I tried to persuade simply said "this isn't my cup of tea, 
I'm not a programmer".

So while I can imagine it _should_ be possible to convince people on the 
professional side of the spectrum, e.g. people responsible for scholarly 
editions that LilyPond _can_ produce professional results while giving 
huge surplus for the quality of the workflow through versioning there 
should be more (tutorial and presentational) material to show that you 
can initially get usable and useful results with rather small investment.
I'm thinking of stuff like integrated sheets for educational purposes.
(OK, that's just one little drop, but:) If someone would write a 
beginner's tutorial how to create such sheets with OOolilypond that 
would be a great resource. I think this approach is particularly nice 
because (IIRC) you can achieve first _useful_ results without even 
bothering about such things as input file structure.

This isn't to say that making LilyPond easier to use wouldn't be a great 
achievement, but people first have to reach the point where they have 
the need to tweak things.

Urs