Re: Serious feedback and improvement headroom

[Francisco Vila]

Urs, this is very interesting. My two thoughts below.

2014-04-04 12:43 GMT+02:00 Urs Liska <address@hidden>:
> ###
>
> The most interesting aspect of the meeting was that Henle's (only) in-house
> engraver was present too, and this may become a fruitful contact. He is
> using Amadeus, a Linux (!) program he bought for 20.000 Euro in 1988 and
> which has been out of development for something like 15 years now.

I think this proves that the industry is generally not impressed with
the free/libre concept of software. I know most architect studios use
pirated AutoCad even if stability of a bridge or a building depends on
it. Maybe education is a bigger "market" for us.

> ###
>
> Another aspect that I found very astonishing is compilation speed. Of course
> Amadeus files have to be compiled before the result is visible, and this can
> be automatically done upon save. I think Frescobaldi's behaviour with Ctrl-M
> and by now the autocompile is an equivalent approach here. But the engraver
> claims that recompilation of a 30 page scores needs 2/10 of a second on an
> average computer. So this _is_ a fundamental difference, because he _does_
> have practically instant WYSIWYG while still benefitting from text input and
> the compiled approach.

A strong point of LilyPond is the beauty contest idea of automated
engraving. That implies iterating through a tree of possibilities and
finding good layouts without human intervention. I don't really know
if it is used for everything, but what's clear is that AI takes time.

Default scores usually look good, but if LilyPond could switch off
most of beauty-related calculations temporarily and cache the rest, it
could possibly speed up things. As always, this is easy to say.

-- 
Francisco Vila. Badajoz (Spain)
www.paconet.org , www.csmbadajoz.com