Re: promoting LilyPond

[Urs Liska]

Am 03.12.2013 08:23, schrieb flup2:
> Although it might look strange, I think that "fair comparison" depends of the
> intended use. For advanced users, of course, a finely tuned score of each
> software would give better idea of "possible end result". But, for a lot of
> users who don't need (or want or know how) those refinements and the
> "standard output" (out of the box, without manual tweaking) will be
> important.
>
> Regarding the feeling of people about the quality of their tool, it's
> simple: most people don't think that their Word layout is crappy. The same
> can occur with musical scores, except that even less people know musical
> typography. So, a lot of people won't think or feel "my score is bad" if
> they don't know which way they could loot better. Some situation will show
> LilyPond better, other will show Finale or Sibelius.

I have the experience from the dual perspective (producing and 
consuming): Playing in orchestras and ensembles you'll get all sorts of 
scores, and I can definitely second what's written in the lilypond.org 
essay: the better the material the better the performance (I think this 
section of the LilyPond introduction was probably the most important 
single incentive for me to try out LilyPond). But when I'm talking to 
composers about it they only vaguely and theoretically understand what 
I'm saying. In general they consider their scores good enough by 
default. They may think hard about how to unambiguously visualizing 
their intention and help the player with the right cue notes or 
(sometimes) page breaks and the like. But making them accept that the 
engraving quality itself matters is a _hard_ task. Probably composers 
should get mandatory courses in sight-reading from differently engraved 
material throughout their studies ;-)

The Word layout example is very good. I can't think of many fellow 
scholars I've met who'd care for layout and typography of their texts. 
Maybe they're astonished when they see their texts professionally 
typeset in a publication, but they wouldn't start to think about using 
better tools for their own writing.
I know of exactly one fellow student who told us he learnt LaTeX to 
write his doctoral thesis - but not for its typography but for creating 
Schenker like graphics.

Urs

> An (really) adventurous image about that could be Plato's Allegory of the
> Cave.
>
> Philippe
>
>
>
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