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From: | Carl Peterson |
Subject: | Re: promoting LilyPond |
Date: | Tue, 3 Dec 2013 13:58:07 -0500 |
Now, to focus on a different point: the question as to whether a truly fair comparison can be made only by professionals. I have no doubt that an experienced professional in Finale (and I've ignored Sibelius because I've never used it, so I have no opinion) could produce a better score than the best that I can do in LilyPond. But I don't think each one's merit could be totally measured based on what one is able to achieve with the greatest skill and effort given at tweaks. I am fairly confident that if a person tried an experiment to make a sample score in Finale that looked like LilyPond's default output, he could nearly well achieve an identical look. He would alter stem, line, slur thickness. He could manually position each note to line up with LilyPond. He could develop a font that copycats LilyPond's default. In the end, the two results would be identical, and based on final output alone, the two options would therefore be judged comparable. Of course, default LilyPond is not the target goal, but my point is that it is not just about what one can do if he applies skill and time to tweaking output. I know that beautiful results can be had from either program with much tweaking on both sides, but default output should be at least part of the comparison.
Then we come to the fact that there are very many people who use either of these programs who are not professionals, or even professionals who do not have the time to tweak every score to perfection. In my case, I am very much aware of many of the tools to tweak just about everything in Finale. However, first, I don't want to have to fight with spacing at the minute level, and secondly, as I was trained to read the music, not write it, I won't know the finer rules of when and where I should override Finale's default. On the one hand, I look at Finale's default output, and on the whole I feel like it looks as it should. But then I look at LilyPond's output and see, "Oh yeah, that does look more correct." That's the best someone like me can do without knowing rules of engraving. So in my circumstance, a comparison of what a professional can do is irrelevant. I need to know rather what *I* can do or what I have time to do in one program or another. So my own comparison of my own work in one versus my own work in the other is exceedingly relevant and fair in helping me decide which is right for me. That is especially true since I am a hobbyist doing my own work for my own use. I'm the only one who needs to be pleased in that case.
And all of this is just to explain a comment I made about what aspect of LilyPond appealed to me that made me give it a second chance. That seemed to be the point of a thread about "promoting LilyPond."
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