Re: Feature request.

[Alexander Kobel]

Cesar Penagos wrote:
> [...] I'm thinking in a feature that I consider very usefully, and
> that all the mayor engraver programs have, and lily has not. This
> feature refers to  the possibility to make Title page [...]

Just my two cents:

What I've seen in other engravers (which isn't much, I have to admit) is
merely the possibility to leave a blank page and put some objects on it.
Free positioning and sizing and all, but that's nothing special in a GUI
program with drag&drop. It's all there already - you just leave out the
notes.
This is actually already possible with LilyPond, too. It isn't too
comfortable, but that's a drawback of the kind of text-only workflow
which Lily uses.
It isn't easy to design a non-standard title with LaTeX or similars,
too, but that's -- to some extent -- actually wanted. Not much choice =>
not much errors.

If you really want nice title pages, won't you do better just using the
text processor or DTP program of your choice and get superior results in
less time? Then append the scores - finished.

> [I] have not installed the Latex program because of the large it is [...]
This way, you just need (for example) pdftk and, possibly, PDFCreator, a
GhostScript frontend (google for them). Both are small, free and easy to
use; if you use LilyPond, you probably have GhostScript installed anyway.


Apart from the user's point of view, I suspect that the people behind
LilyPond don't want to reinvent the wheel. If you look at other open
source projects -- Mozilla might be the best example -- you might find
that a plentora of features doesn't delight the programmers. If you want
it good -- and that's what Lily is designed for -- you have to invest
large amounts of time for interfaces, programming, debugging,
documentation, ...; time you might feel to be better used for the main
task of LilyPond: _music_ engraving.
It's kind of the idea behind the number of Unix commands: "Do [only] one
thing, [and/but] do it well." And, despite my very little experience
with Lily, I'm very convinced that Lily _does_ it well...


Well, my two cents have grown longer than expected...