Re: engraving comparisons and other "promotional" materials

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 07/12/13 19:54, Urs Liska wrote:
> But once we're going to compete with people from other tools' mailing lists it
> will probably become a real (and therefore less informative) competition.

Well, if you couch it in terms along the lines of, "Hey, we're just trying to 
improve our software here, we all want the best software" and make it a friendly 
game rather than a "Hey, we're better than you!" exercise, I don't see that it 
need get too serious (at least in the sense of unfriendly competition).  Anyway, 
there's a limit to how competitive it can get simply by virtue of the fact that 
Lilypond can be tweaked in response to how it does in such a competition, 
whereas with Finale, the development team has to take notice :-)

Personally I would approach the Finale community with an invitation that gives 
the impression that you expect to come out worse in this comparison (because 
after all, it's about productivity rather than default engraving quality), but 
that you hope to learn something from the exercise.  Then, if it's true, 
appropriate gratitude can be shown and lessons can be learned -- while if 
Lilypond comes out ahead (in which case, it should also be approached with 
humility rather than triumphalism), hopefully a few Finale users will start 
taking Lilypond more seriously.

The important thing to recognize is that Finale and Sibelius users are not the 
competition.  They're fellow dreamers about excellence in music notation software.