Re: promoting LilyPond

[Garrett McGilvray]

On Dec 3, 2013, at 12:55 AM, Martin Tarenskeen <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 2 Dec 2013, Garrett McGilvray wrote:
> 
>> The reason that I came back for a second try was not that it was free, since 
>> I had already paid for "the real thing."  I don't remember what made me 
>> think of it, but I remembered the essay on LilyPond's goal of superior 
>> engraving, and I decided to give it a second try. I fared better the second 
>> time. I have redone some of my past work in LilyPond, and I like the new 
>> results better. I doubt now I'll go back to Finale.
> 
> I would be interested to see a comparison of some *good* scores engraved 
> using Finale (and/or Sibelius) and the same scores using LilyPond. Maybe you 
> can post some examples?
> 
> It's easy to show a really bad Finale result and compare it with how much 
> better LilyPond can do this.
> 
> But it is more fair to compare a good Finale/Sibelius score, prepared by a 
> skilled and experienced Finale/Sibelius user, and then try to use LilyPond to 
> do things better.

If a true comparison between Finale and LilyPond is what you want, then I am 
surely not the person to provide it, because as you say, a truly fair 
comparison should be made by comparing results by people with much experience 
in each program. But if that is not what you want, then I can't help but feel 
that posting my own example of a "*good*" score of mine would be an invitation 
for everyone to critique what I did wrong in either version. The whole point of 
my post was not that LilyPond was better than Finale but rather to agree with 
David's comment that the fact that LilyPond is free should not be its main 
selling point, because that's not what drew me in. Whether or not LilyPond is 
better is irrelevant to my point, but rather that I perceived it to be better, 
and that is what eventually drew me in.

Now, to focus on a different point: the question as to whether a truly fair 
comparison can be made only by professionals. I have no doubt that an 
experienced professional in Finale (and I've ignored Sibelius because I've 
never used it, so I have no opinion) could produce a better score than the best 
that I can do in LilyPond. But I don't think each one's merit could be totally 
measured based on what one is able to achieve with the greatest skill and 
effort given at tweaks. I am fairly confident that if a person tried an 
experiment to make a sample score in Finale that looked like LilyPond's default 
output, he could nearly well achieve an identical look. He would alter stem, 
line, slur thickness. He could manually position each note to line up with 
LilyPond. He could develop a font that copycats LilyPond's default. In the end, 
the two results would be identical, and based on final output alone, the two 
options would therefore be judged comparable. Of course, default LilyPond is 
not the target goal, but my point is that it is not just about what one can do 
if he applies skill and time to tweaking output. I know that beautiful results 
can be had from either program with much tweaking on both sides, but default 
output should be at least part of the comparison.

Then we come to the fact that there are very many people who use either of 
these programs who are not professionals, or even professionals who do not have 
the time to tweak every score to perfection. In my case, I am very much aware 
of many of the tools to tweak just about everything in Finale. However, first, 
I don't want to have to fight with spacing at the minute level, and secondly, 
as I was trained to read the music, not write it, I won't know the finer rules 
of when and where I should override Finale's default. On the one hand, I look 
at Finale's default output, and on the whole I feel like it looks as it should. 
But then I look at LilyPond's output and see, "Oh yeah, that does look more 
correct." That's the best someone like me can do without knowing rules of 
engraving. So in my circumstance, a comparison of what a professional can do is 
irrelevant. I need to know rather what *I* can do or what I have time to do in 
one program or another. So my own comparison of my own work in one versus my 
own work in the other is exceedingly relevant and fair in helping me decide 
which is right for me. That is especially true since I am a hobbyist doing my 
own work for my own use. I'm the only one who needs to be pleased in that case.

And all of this is just to explain a comment I made about what aspect of 
LilyPond appealed to me that made me give it a second chance. That seemed to be 
the point of a thread about "promoting LilyPond."