Hi! For the compiling time, I am surprised that sometimes it takes almost a minute to compile only 3 pages of music for alto, double bass and piano! The fastest is 30 seconds. I am using LilyPond 2.11.11 on a MacBook Intel Core Duo with 512 Mb.
For the interface, the best thing for a text entry based interface is that the format and the offset you put on the notes and other symbols will stay the same if you don't change the code in that part of the piece. That is the most annoying with the WYSIWYG interface of Sibelius. Even the beam format might change if you add a note in the measure! And I am not talking about the quality of the font. The stems fall a little besides the notehead and off the beams. It shows in printing. The Feta font is A LOT better. But Sibelius is excellent for its intuitive interface. The entering of most notes and symbols and, most important, the change of position of the symbols is far more easy to do than in LilyPond. For example, entering tempo indications and text spanners in Sibelius is a piece of cake, while working with LilyPond needs good programming skills to do the same, especially if you want it at the place you want it. Thanks to LilyPondTool, moving some symbols (but unfortunately not all) are a little easier. But a GUI interface would be great to see immediately the changes of position of some symbols on the score. This topic had been already discussed in an article on LilyPond by Han-Wenn. LilyPondTool does that partially for some symbols, but not for everything. I am not a programmer. I can't start to program myself to make an interface. But I may suggest some clues for design. It may be possible to have the best of both worlds : text and graphic inputs. Remember WordPerfect? One of the reasons for its success in the 80/90s was the option to enter relatively WYSIWIGly the text (remember the different colors to say Bold or Italic, brrr!) but to be able to SEE the code underneath the format and change it. Maybe it would be a way to design an interface for LilyPond : to be able to enter code by GUI or text. Also, if ever a team want to start to work on this thing, I suggest to look at Berlioz, an almost unknown notation program designed solely for engraving. Here is the site : www.berlioz.tm.fr (only in French) The font is not as inviting as LilyPond (but it is nicely lighter in some ways), but the quality of the layout of notes and the design of slurs is amazing. The way it is designed make it possible to do everything you want without much tweaking and unorthodox ways to bypass the program standards. It is divided in three procedures. The last procedure is almost like an SVG editor where you can move and place everything you want. But one problem about this program is its price : over 600 euros!! If a parallel team could work for an interface which would use the code of Lilypond for engraving but would be easy for a non-programmer to use, many more people would gain interest to it. The text entry alone is allright, but gets very complicated when you want to use all the possibilities of LilyPond to do elaborate scores. I would have give up if it wasn't for LilyPondTool to remind me of the format of the tweaks. That are my big two cents. Regards, Frederic Chiasson
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