Re: Supporting my work on LilyPond financially

[Richard Shann]

On Sun, 2013-12-01 at 11:41 +0100, David Kastrup wrote:
> > In my opinion, there are only two things that will ever change this:
> > 1. A real, live, useable, full-functioned GUI (so that users *never*
> > have to see Lilypond “code”);
> 
> According to the advertising, that's Denemo. 

I hope nothing I write could be described as advertising, rather than
describing. I never have to see Lilypond "code" for the music typsetting
that I do with Denemo, but that is because I have installed all the
tweaks I need (you can parcel up Lilypond code as a user to be emitted
by a command that you install into Denemo, with the same status as
Denemo's other commands). 
So it depends on the user; likewise "publication quality" depends on the
publisher - I use the term in the way that I guess people will
understand it, namely better than some main-stream publishers editions
that I have.
Later in this thread someone has commented that many users want to be
able to make a score look just like they want. I think this is so -
often people want a score to look exactly like some particular thing;
one suspects that had they seen something else, they would have wanted
that instead. Such people with a specific idea of what they want the
final output to look like will usually have to tackle the LilyPond code
when using Denemo - more often they will jump to the far end and start
editing the output. (Truly, I know of people using pdf editors!).

How this compares with people's experience of commercial programs I
don't really know - the other day someone posted a Sibelius score on
IMSLP which wouldn't render correctly on my Debian Stable box. They had
posted the musicXML too, so I imported it into Denemo and re-typeset it
with LilyPond. The result was this:

http://imslp.org/wiki/Oboe_Sonata_in_C_major_(Albinoni,_Tomaso)

I didn't need to tweak it with LilyPond, and, for fun, I transposed it
up a minor third for treble recorder with absolutely no further
adjustments. This was remarkably painless, even though there were
mistakes in the musicXML (there is one bar that is actually incomplete
and one with wrong notes).

Richard