Re: Supporting my work on LilyPond financially

[David Kastrup]

Henning Hraban Ramm <address@hidden> writes:

> Am 2013-12-01 um 19:15 schrieb David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
>
>> I'm always a bit surprised about the low resonance on features like
>> 
>> <URL:http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=3648>
>> Issue 3648: Patch: Isolated durations in music sequences now stand for
>> unpitched notes
>
> I hear you - as a magazine layouter I seldom get feedback at all, and
> then mostly some nitpicking of the authors.
>
> Hey, isolated durations are GREAT! I can remember some pieces where
> they would have been very handy.

Well, the main reason I'm surprised is that a few years ago there were
proposals about it and I said "this will have to wait until some other
parser parts are where they need to be" and there was wailing and
gnashing of teeth.  Actually, that was the second iteration.  The first
was rather heated, Han-Wen violently opposed the idea, I agreed with
him, there was bitter disappointment, and then q was designed instead.

Fixing the broken and hotly loved q eventually fell to my lot, and
issue 2240, required for that, introduced the largest Scheme
incompatibility for 2.16.  We still have fallout from that.

So now the stars are right, I mean, the parser parts are where I needed
them to be for the original issue, I implement the stuff, and people
have moved on.  And implementing the stuff comes at a cost: it was
moderate for me once I had the parser where I needed it to be, but of
course there is a followup cost for all tools that try understanding
LilyPond input: editors, converters, and so on.

We have not really found a good answer to that problem.  Good MusicXML
support would help as it is not affected by how user-friendly the
LilyPond input is.

> Can’t say anything about other improvements - most of my songs are too
> simple for them, and I use LilyPond far too seldom.
> But I’m looking forward to better accidentals in chord names.

Chord names look generally awful by default.  It's not just the
accidentals.  That's really an area where we could need a good
typesetting and font person (someone with a lot of experience rather
than someone just interested in doing it) to pound them into shape.

-- 
David Kastrup