I tried LP several years ago and quickly gave up. I decided to try it again because I was frustrated with all of the manual adjustments my Finale scores require, and wanted to see if LP could do better.
LP is indeed better — in that its default decisions are almost always better than Finale’s default. The price you pay is that an LP score is considerably more time-consuming to enter. Although I expect to get better at it over time, I don’t think that disadvantage can ever go away entirely. I was trained as a software engineer. I later went into a different field, but I haven’t forgotten the concepts — and I feel like I need them. LP resembles coding in a lot of ways. Some of its behavior is reasonably obvious, but much of it is very hard and non-obvious. By the way, I am typesetting an opera score, which is clearly not the easiest place to start—but that is what I do. I am guessing that whoever designed LP was not thinking of orchestral scores, as some things that ought to be easy (the “MarkLine” concept) are in fact quite difficult. On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 2:26 PM Jean Abou Samra <j...@abou-samra.fr> wrote: > I am pretty interested in how people learn LilyPond. My own experience > from discovering it around 15 is that I was able to enter simple music > quickly; however, adding staves, instrument names and creating polyphony > caused many hardships (\voiceTwo is not the second voice!, etc.) I wonder > if it'd be a good idea to organize one-time presentations, courses, this > sort of things, for music students − composers are among the primary > types of LilyPond users after all. > -- Marc Shepherd
