Dear All,
Three recent threads (are we the future, mutopia, and new users' feelings about the docs) have prompted me to start a new one rather than write separate replies to each. Apologies in advance for the length, but I would be very grateful for some replies.
I am very happy to say that a module I offered at the university where I teach, on preparing scores with lilypond, has been taken up by the students (whether the course runs or not is their choice so I consider it a democratic victory!), and will run for twelve weeks this forthcoming October-December. I will have about ten sophister B.A. students (music students at the end of their degrees).
The scope of the course will be to teach some of the finer points of engraving (Gould is the module reference text) and then get them to produce their own editions of out-of-copyright scores which we will then try to upload to mutopia (and perhaps imslp, but I haven't looked into that).
So a few things:
1. I'm viewing this as an opportunity to `turn' a few of our students (who mostly seem to use pirated copies of Sibelius). I haven't researched the module yet but I hope that I will have some exemplary scores to show off LilyPond when the time comes around. The only commercially available one that I am aware of is Urs and Janek's Fried songbook. (By the way, I read in another thread that they sold framed A3 pages from it - are they still doing that? I would love one) If anyone can point me in the direction of more LilyPond-engraved material that would be great.
2. There seems to be a consensus among a small group here that LilyPond's default output isn't really publishing standard. I've never engraved a full score with it (I do examples and diagrams for my own work or the work of other academics), so I've never really bumped up against this issue. Can anyone list the things that they routinely improve? I know Kieran and some others proposed creating some stylesheets to help in this area (and somewhere I have a very nice engraving of the first page of Beethoven's Op. 10 sonatas) - was there any progress with that?
3. Since I will, in effect, be creating a tutorial for new LilyPond users, perhaps I could encourage some collaboration here, and make the results freely available. MuseScore has an excellent series of tutorial videos, for example. I'm not necessarily saying that format would be best for LilyPond, but I do think there is room in the ecosystem for a tutorial in addition to the (excellent) learning manual, which I paid a considerable price in terms of time for not reading more thoroughly the first time around...
Thanks for reading,
Kevin