> But it really bothers me when programmers get condescending with
> users, implying that we are stupid if we can't understand the
> documentation, or if we don't have all hundreds of pages of snippets
> using complex overrides and Scheme tweaks memorized.
Well, we *need* to know what you don't understand or what you can't
find in the documentation! And please help improving this by
contributing patches.
> A programming language should be completely self contained. My
> impression is that about 30-40% of all of the examples in the
> documentation include Scheme code to make the LilyPond code work.
Well, Scheme has been used to make LilyPond as flexible as possible.
> I still haven't figured out when plain "text" quotes are adequate
> for a command, and when #"text" scheme contants are needed for a
> command.
The latter form should almost always work, as far as I know. There
have been discussions whether the form without # should be disabled...
> And what the heck does a #' mean with some of the commands?
The `#' starts a Scheme expression, and the quote character prevents
expansion of the symbol following it (in case you are knowing TeX,
this is the equivalent to \noexpand).
> In other words, reading the documentation, I can't figure out which
> commands are LilyPond commands and which are Scheme commands.
Well, most LilyPond commands are implemented as Scheme expressions...
> There are pages and pages of context and variable names without a
> clue as to what they mean or how a user off-the-street is supposed
> to change their values.
Indeed. Lord, give us the man-power to improve that in the
documentation. :-(
> And, I confess that my solution a few months ago was to use \hspace
> to brute force put the text where I wanted it by trial and error.
> This was a pain but solved my problem at the time. What really
> frustrated me was the vertical spacing issues which are perfectly
> illustrated in Valentin's LSR snippet. A \markup always gravitates
> closer to the score after it, which makes formatting the twelve
> verses of my sample third antiphon above nearly impossible.
Well, LilyPond is still full of bugs. It's very unfortunate that
Han-Wen has virtually no time to work on it currently :-(
> I gave up trying to understand the \markup documentation when I
> discovered I could use OOoLilyPond to create png score snippets for
> each hymn that I could paste into MS Word documents containing the
> text of the church service. Then I have complete WYSIWYG control
> over the page layout. For pure production, this is by far the
> fastest solution I have found to get work done.
And this will probably be the best solution forever. You can't expect
that LilyPond is a full-featured text processor engine. Maybe this
improves over time...
Werner
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