Re: [GLISS] why the hell all this fuss (was: modern-straight-flag)

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 12:15 AM, Reinhold Kainhofer <address@hidden> 
wrote:
> [1] Note, however, that ANY change, even a very small, subtle change, is a
> really grave argument for a music publisher against using lilypond.
> I wrote a huge piece (~95 pages full score, 23 orchestra instruments, choir,
> etc) a few years ago. I didn't count the hours it took me last month to
> bring it up to date with the latest lilypond version (I had to visually
> compare the whole full score and all instruments to make sure that nothing
> had been lost).
> At that time, I really, really, really cursed lilypond and its frequent
> syntax changes.

Is that really true that it will be such an issue for a _publisher_?  Perhaps a 
small 1- or 2-person operation, but for a significant publisher like Universal 
Edition, Edition Peters, etc., will that still apply?

After all, you have to bear in mind the following:

  (1) If you're bringing out a new edition, the publisher is likely to have it
      all re-engraved from scratch anyway.

  (2) Many corrections don't need the music engraving software at all -- you can
      edit the PDF/PostScript of the score with a graphical editor.

  (3) It's not exactly unknown for publishers to maintain machines to run legacy
      software (e.g. SCORE).

It's been quite a while since I last used Finale, but I remember when I did that 
many of the professional engravers active on the MakeMusic forums actually used 
older versions of the software because they were more stable and bug-free.  Many 
of the improvements brought by later versions, such as improved notational 
support or better engraving quality, were irrelevant to them in practice because 
for unusual notation they would just import a postscript print of a skeleton 
score into a graphical editor and tweak it further there; and where engraving 
quality was concerned, house style was sufficiently varied that they would in 
any case have to do huge amounts of manual intervention.

Has anyone ever actually engaged with any major publishers to identify the 
factors that are of interest to them in engraving software, and the features 
that Lilypond would have to implement in order to meet their requirements?