lilypond manual intro

[Karl Berry]

These are not really bugs, all up for interpretation, so I thought I'd
write here ...

I wanted to give a url about simple Lilypond input to the prototypical
naive user (my mom, who is a musician but not a programmer).

I start at http://lilypond.org/website/manuals.html.  It says:
  Text input: LilyPond is a text-based music engraver. Read this first! 

Ok, I go there (http://lilypond.org/website/text-input.html).  And the
example looks quite complex, what with numerous colors, arrows, etc.,
etc.  Not what I want to show my mom.  And furthermore, the text there
says "our beginner documentation covers everything at a much more
gradual pace".  True enough.  So maybe manuals.html should not say to
"read this first"?

Anyway, ok, so I go back to the manuals page and go to "Learning" and
eventually (half a dozen links later, but fine) to "Simple notation"
(http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/learning/simple-notation).

The first example there looks good (and is in fact what I sent her).
But then the second example, instead of showing how to typeset other
kinds of notation, goes into \relative.  Is this really the next thing
people want from a tutorial?  I would have expected to see how to choose
a different clef or time signature or type of note or ... anything but
that.

I totally understand the goodness and desirability of \relative.  I only
question whether it is the absolute first (well, second) thing to tell
people about.  As that page itself says: "Relative mode can be confusing
initially".  I completely agree.


On another front: it seems suboptimal to me for that url to embed the
version number.  It means that when I give out the url, it is basically
never going to change.  What I really want to give out is the "current
tutorial" url, to take advantage of whatever improvements get made.


Anyway, just passing along these observations FWIW ...

karl