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Hi there,
Am 11.04.14 00:36, schrieb Urs Liska:
Nevertheless
I think that trying to improve usability _now_ _is_ a good thing.
Yes it is, _but_ the question of _how_ to achieve the improved
usibility is dangerous. We should focus on the
unique characteristic of lilypond: It can't do graphical tweaks on
its own, but it can separate content and layout in a unique way. And
it can be used as a scripted backend to any frontend. So improving
the text part for shorter and more readable input is a really good
thing. What else could it be?
A user of a (notation) software usually needs to finish stuff for
a concrete purpose. An engraver will probably need to finish a
score for being printed. And he needs to do that "now". Telling
him "we could make it easier for you, but that will make your
scores less flexible regarding future development of LilyPond"
sounds completely ridiculous from the user's perspective.
OTOH it's clear that on the long run this user would benefit
significantly when he wouldn't have to use manual tweaks. at least
as soon as he wants to do a second run with some fixes.
IMO its always good to improve lily and reduce needed manual tweaks.
*But* I don't believe its possible to reduce manual tweaks to zero.
So I'd say its very important to ease tweak input, to provide
templates and to improve separation of content and layout. That way
not only an end user, but also an application - GUI or Batchprocess
- can separate tasks in the engraving workflow.
It's similar with visual feedback. Telling someone that we don't
help with getting visual feedback for ideological reasons ("we
provide a text based workflow which we consider superior, so
please respect that and stick to text - otherwise got back to
Finale") doesn't make any sense to me. There are undisputable
advantages in text based workflows, but these don't have anything
to do with whether the user wants or needs visual feedback for his
work.
Yes, but lilypond is a text-based commandline tool that can easily
be used with frescobaldi. So I would say, it's a good thing, if
there are ways to make communication between lily and frescobaldi
easier to achieve cool things. But the graphical part is still on
frescobaldis side - and should stay there. IMO lily should stay as
silly as possible regarding this matter, because otherwise we might
complicate things. And if frescobaldi can provide such a thing,
thats great, *but* its a frescobaldi issue, *not* a lilypond issue.
I say that, because we might modify things in lilypond to make this
possible in frescobaldi, but making it worse for other frontends.
Just some of my fuzzy thoughts ;)
Cheers, Jan-Peter
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