Re: Newbie Question -- verse and chorus

[Tim Rowe]

> Actually, the manuals are pretty good.

After a fashion, yes. What's there is clear and well written. But the
indexing and cross referencing is weak (too often it leads to where a
concept is just mentioned rather than explained) and there seem to be
gaps (although that might be because I can't find the material because
of the cross-referencing and indexing issues), and when a section
depends on something I can't find an explanation of (such as contexts)
then it's not so clear. For free software that is pretty good, but it
does mean that "RTFM" is unlikely to get to the root of an issue.

> 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.

I'm a fairly experienced laTeX user, and Lilypond seems to have some
similarity with laTeX. That has the same issue, but being so widely
used there's a lot more information out there.


> 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).

Well, I have a postgrad degree in computer science, I can use laTeX, I
know some Lisp and have a very slight knowledge of Scheme, so I ought
to be reasonably placed, but like you "I really need someone to hold
my hand while I get started, and that doesn't happen on this list".

Perhaps there should be a lilypond_newbie mailing list too ;-)

-- 
Tim Rowe