Thanks to the 'Pond (was "Re: disappearing post(s)?")

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Phil,

> I quite often seem to lose posts sent directly to the lists - especially 
> devel.  I now tend to start a thread posted there using the Gmane interface. 
> Never had a problem with that.

Thanks for the hint!

Since this thread seems to show up okay, I’m just going to copy the content 
here, and hope it goes through… If it doesn’t, I’ll try the Gmane interface, as 
per your suggestion.

Best,
Kieren.

ORIGINAL POST:

Hello all,

Just a note to say how grateful I am to all of the developers and users of 
Lilypond, current and past.

I use Lilypond on a daily basis, for extremely career-critical work. Weekly, I 
use it to quickly generate vocal or choral arrangements/scores for the music 
classes I teach/direct. Monthly (on average), I generate a new classical 
instrumental, vocal, or choral commission with it. And two or three times a 
year (on average), I use Lilypond to engrave a new “very large project” (e.g., 
a stage musical, chamber opera, large-scale orchestral composition/arrangement, 
etc.). In the last 12 months alone, I’ve generated several thousand new score 
pages — e.g., a 106-page piano-conductor score in the first six days of July 
alone [!] — for music which has been performed and heard live by almost 30,000 
people.

Today was the world premiere of my newest two-act musical, “Lord of the Fries”. 
The scores look amazing (of course!), and were — relatively speaking — a breeze 
to generate. Now that I’ve built templates/stylesheets for all the different 
types of scores I need to generate for my musical theatre works — i.e., vocal 
book without script, vocal book with script, piano-conductor score, full score, 
and instrumental parts — the time from manuscript to PDF-set is astonishingly 
short. And with Jan-Peter’s editionEngraver, I can tweak-fix the worst Lilypond 
“gaffes” in just a few moments.

I don’t know if anyone else is pushing Lily as hard or as far as I am, or on so 
regular a basis. (If so, I’d love to hear from you, on-list or privately!)
Are there obstacles out here “on the front”? You betcha.
Do I curse Lily from time to time? Definitely.

But I can’t imagine doing what I’m doing, as quickly, with such high quality — 
and actually enjoying it — if I had to use any other engraving application.

With thanks,
Kieren.