Re: Supporting my work on LilyPond financially

[David Kastrup]

Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Joseph,
>
>> The default output of Finale is indeed ugly, and I was reminded that
>> Sibelius too has its problems when I recently received a score from
>> a friend which would surely have looked much better done in
>> Lilypond.
>> 
>> The thing is, though, both are so easy to tweak, it doesn't matter.
>
> I disagree somewhat… and so do most of my Finale- and Sibelius-using
> friends and colleagues, who complain endlessly about how much time it
> takes to tweak scores and parts.
>
> What *is* true is that beauty in engraving is less of an issue to most
> people than just getting it done.
>
>> what matters to the end user is very often the facility to get the
>> score _just as they want it_, not the ability of the program to
>> automatically second-guess their desires.
>
> Actually, what matters to most end user is to have something “good
> enough”… and, I’m sad to say, Finale and Sibelius do that (for them)
> with almost no tweaking at all.

If people are not interested in the output, the selling point are the
input methods.

I'm always a bit surprised about the low resonance on features like

<URL:http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=3648>
Issue 3648: Patch: Isolated durations in music sequences now stand for
unpitched notes

or the followup

<URL:http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=3682>
Issue 3682: Patch: Implement \beamExceptions function fishing exceptions
from beamed music.

which feel to me like non-trivial steps in usability.  But most of the
time I'm left alone with figuring out what might work best for people.

-- 
David Kastrup