Hi Gilles, > This cannot be the overall guiding rule, if "progress" has any value at all. > Is the sole expectation, of students attending music schools, to be > hired by a publishing company?
Of course not — I neither said nor even implied that. However, right now schools have the choice between spending valuable education time teaching young composers command-line programming for the purpose of using Lilypond to engrave scores which would never under any circumstances be accepted by any serious music publisher, or teaching them how to use the (e.g.) Sibelius GUI to quickly prepare a score that would be accepted (and in some cases demanded) by almost all publishers. It’s a no-brainer, and always will be. And we’re not even talking about non-composers, i.e., the vast majority of music school students (singers and instrumentalists) who want to quickly crank out a transposition of a song or whatever. Expecting them or teaching them to use today’s Lilypond is beyond laughable: it’s actually cruel. > Personally, I think that it is equally wrong to teach (how to become > dependent of) proprietary products, the more so when a free (and more > fit to the task!) alternative exists. [Cf. M$-Office versus LaTeX for > typographic quality and consistency.] I still think they should be teaching long division and cursive writing in elementary school, so you’re preaching to the choir to some degree. But it’s clearly not serving any student to teach them LaTeX at the expense of Microsoft Word, if any portion of their education is ostensibly so that they can graduate and fairly quickly become a productive member of today’s larger society. The ratio of job postings I’ve seen that ask for “Microsoft Word skills” to those asking for “LaTeX skills” is on the order of 99:1. Far better — to extend your analogy — would be to shift the business world to using LaTeX *first* (or, at the very least, *simultaneously*), so that there is an actual demand for the [superior] skills we personally want to see taught. > I might be wrong, but I think that the vast majority of music engraving > software users don't make their choice based on what a publishing company > uses. Well that’s self-evidently true for Lilypond users. ;) But you’re 100% wrong for the rest of the engraving world: as a working composer, arranger, and educator, I can say with 100% certainty that any GUI-based consideration beyond Finale or Sibelius (e.g., NoteAbilityPro, etc.) is met with intense skepticism in significant part because no publisher will accept the files once completed. (The GUIs are essentially in feature- and ease-parity, so that’s not a factor. And price doesn’t stop anyone: they either pony up or pirate.) The very biggest hurdle is, and will probably always be, inertia: music schools install and instruct on Finale or Sibelius. And that’s in largest part because those are the [publishing] industry standards, so that just further proves my point. > LilyPond would be a serious alternative for new publishing houses. Not if it can’t *very easily* handle input files from Finale, Sibelius, and other “industry standard” engraving applications. That’s an almost foolproof recipe for financial failure. Cheers, Kieren. ________________________________ Kieren MacMillan, composer ‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info ‣ email: i...@kierenmacmillan.info _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
