Re: Newbie Question -- verse and chorus

[Anthony W. Youngman]

In message 
<address@hidden>, Tim Rowe 
<address@hidden> writes
> 2009/5/11 Graham Percival <address@hidden>:
>
> > RTF Learning Manual.  It's written specifically for this purpose.
> > - Graham
>
> Really I find this attitude very aggressive, hostile and unwelcoming,
> and quite unlike all of the other email groups for software that I
> use.

Graham's quite cuddly when you get to know him - like a hedgehog you 
just have to be very careful how you cuddle him :-)
> In the case of every question I have asked, I have not only scoured
> the manuals -- not just the learning manual -- but also searched the
> snippets repository and the web in general for anything that might
> give me a clue. Each question has only been asked after *hours* of
> searching. In the case of every question I have asked, somebody has
> just told me to "read the manuals" as if I were some sort of idiot. I
> have to say that I find the manuals very poor -- they assume a lot of
> prior knowledge, and they are poorly indexed, but this is usual for
> free software -- documentation almost always lags behind, but usually
> it's compensated by a friendly user community.

Actually, the manuals are pretty good. And we have Graham to thank for 
that.

The problem is that lilypond is NOT a user-friendly program. It's a 
highly sophisticated typesetting program and, as you say, assumes a LOT 
of background knowledge in order to be able to use it well.

It's easy to use in a basic sense. As soon as you try and do anything 
complicated (as I'm trying to do) you hit a *steep* learning curve.

But that's the nature of the beast. Any tool that sets out to do a 
specialist job well *will*, by the very *nature* of the thing, be a tool 
that requires a specialist user.
> I'm very disappointed in the attitude of some members of this group,
> who seem to want Lilypond to be a private club and don't want the
> inconvenience of new members. Your hostility and unhelpfulness makes
> me strongly tempted to go back to Finale, but fortunately /some/
> members of the mailing list have a much more welcoming and helpful
> attitude.
>
> If this is not an appropriate place to ask elementary questions that I
> can't find addressed in the manuals or on the web (even if the answers
> are buried in there somewhere) then please tell me where I /can/ ask
> those questions. Otherwise your attitude is simply going to drive
> people away. Maybe that's what you want.
This is the place to ask :-( Just give Graham as good as you get :-)

The difficulty is that steep learning curve. Any decent lilypond piece 
of music is a *program*, written in a *schizophrenic* *mix* of lilypond 
and Scheme (which is a dialect of Guile, which is a dialect of Lisp, 
which is something many people, including programmers nowadays, have 
never met).

Some people seem to find that transition from simple to decent easy - 
I've seen it happen to people on the list. Others find it hard. I'm 
finding it hard. I really need someone to hold my hand while I get 
started, and that doesn't happen on this list. People are helpful though 
- on several occasions people have offered to write stuff I want 
(sometimes for a fee :-). But I don't want it written for me, I want to 
write it myself in order to learn, and that's where this list does fall 
apart a bit :-(

Cheers,
Wol
--
Anthony W. Youngman - address@hidden