Hi there,
Am 11.04.14 00:36, schrieb Urs Liska:
Nevertheless I think that trying to improve usability _now_ _is_ a
good thing.
Yes it is, _but_ the question of _how_ to achieve the improved usibility
is dangerous. We should focus on the unique characteristic of lilypond:
It can't do graphical tweaks on its own, but it can separate content and
layout in a unique way. And it can be used as a scripted backend to any
frontend. So improving the text part for shorter and more readable input
is a really good thing. What else could it be?
A user of a (notation) software usually needs to finish stuff for a
concrete purpose. An engraver will probably need to finish a score for
being printed. And he needs to do that "now". Telling him "we could
make it easier for you, but that will make your scores less flexible
regarding future development of LilyPond" sounds completely ridiculous
from the user's perspective.
OTOH it's clear that on the long run this user would benefit
significantly when he wouldn't have to use manual tweaks. at least as
soon as he wants to do a second run with some fixes.
IMO its always good to improve lily and reduce needed manual tweaks.
*But* I don't believe its possible to reduce manual tweaks to zero. So
I'd say its very important to ease tweak input, to provide templates and
to improve separation of content and layout. That way not only an end
user, but also an application - GUI or Batchprocess - can separate tasks
in the engraving workflow.
It's similar with visual feedback. Telling someone that we don't help
with getting visual feedback for ideological reasons ("we provide a
text based workflow which we consider superior, so please respect that
and stick to text - otherwise got back to Finale") doesn't make any
sense to me. There are undisputable advantages in text based
workflows, but these don't have anything to do with whether the user
wants or needs visual feedback for his work.
Yes, but lilypond is a text-based commandline tool that can easily be
used with frescobaldi. So I would say, it's a good thing, if there are
ways to make communication between lily and frescobaldi easier to
achieve cool things. But the graphical part is still on frescobaldis
side - and should stay there. IMO lily should stay as silly as possible
regarding this matter, because otherwise we might complicate things. And
if frescobaldi can provide such a thing, thats great, *but* its a
frescobaldi issue, *not* a lilypond issue. I say that, because we might
modify things in lilypond to make this possible in frescobaldi, but
making it worse for other frontends.
Just some of my fuzzy thoughts ;)
Cheers, Jan-Peter
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