Dear Dev team, I don't know if this discussion has come up before, but I thought I'd bring something up that's been on my mind. I'd like to propose that we remove the tagline variable (or at least its default value). For a while now (and spurred on by some recent comments on other forums), I've felt that the automatic presence of the tagline "Music engraving by LilyPond X.Y.Z--www.lilypond.org" is annoying, a little bit cocky and a real turn-off to those who don't use LP. Naturally, it attracts attention, but shouldn't the engraving quality of the score speak for itself?
In any new score I create, it has become second nature for me to set tagline = ##f because it gets in the way of the finished product. I don't even think about it anymore, I just do it. I think this is also true for most other power users. However, for those who are new, those who use it occasionally, casually, etc., they may not think to turn this off in their scores and users of other programs don't take them seriously. Instead of the LP user implying "My score looks better than yours because I used LP to do it," I'd rather have it be the non-LP user thinking "Wow! That looks so good! What program did they use?" and then come to learn it was done with LP. I say that because I've experienced both and the latter is way more fulfilling (and door-opening) than the first. Am I the only one who feels this way? I realize that the tagline has had a specific purpose, but I don't really think I've seen another program do anything like it--and for good reason. As a comparison, if LibreOffice (which I use all the time), or better yet, Microsoft Office, automatically put in their own tagline at the bottom of the last page of a document, I'D GO CRAZY and immediately search to find out how to turn it off permanently. I wouldn't want to have to turn it off for each document. That would get old real quick. Get the program out of the way and let the music do the talking. That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying we should necessarily do away with the variable altogether, but just have no default value unless the user wants one there like all the other header variables. I can see that having something like the current default value printed to the page during regression tests could be useful, but really, what's the point anywhere else? I'm not sure what prompted Han-wen or Jan or whoever to set a default value to it, but I wonder if it's time for it to go? Just some thoughts. I love the quality of LP scores. Removing the default tagline value would make it even more professional (to me, at least), even for the budding new users. Feel free to shoot now. What do you all think about my proposal? Best Regards, Abraham _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
