Re: This is what's missing from LilyPond....

[Tim Nowaczyk]

On Thu, Jun 21, 2001 at 04:56:44PM -0500, Felipe Gasper wrote:
> ...which is also missing from Finale and Sibelius. Or at least, what would
> make me find the software more appealing. :-)
> 
  While I don't agree that this is *the* thing missing from lily, it would be a 
huge step.  If users see that our product is the *best* in one, or more, areas, 
we will start making a bigger impact on the market.  The big question is "Where 
do we focus our time?".  We can add support for a few new, and difficult, 
features, or we can focus on improving what's already there and make it the 
best it can be.  Am I correct in assuming we want everyone using lily?  It 
would be great if we could get to the point that Finale and Sibelius were 
waiting for *our* next release to see what features they need to add to their 
software :)

> Fretboard diagrams. Sibelius's support for fretboards is crude at best.
> Finale's is much more versatile, but it's still clunky. Given the demand
> for notating popular music, I would think fretboard diagram notation would
> be a priority for Lilypond. As a suggestion, look at Finale's options, and
> try to make it easier to notate capoed guitar chords, as well as being
> easier to have a library of custom chord voicings, tunings, etc. See the
> guitar edition of the folk hymnal "Gather" by GIA for reference, widely
> used in American Catholic parishes.
> 
  Fretboard diagrams would be great!  I think someone was going to work on them 
about a year ago, but I don't remember how far he got.

> Further along the lines of popular music, I would add good, robust
> support for guitar tablature. While I will maintain that guitarists
> *should* learn to read notes, tablature is used very widely in popular
> music, so much so that it's become a standard feature of notation
> software.
> 
  This is something that has been on the TODO list for a *long* time. With good 
reason.  From what I remember, supporting tab will require a large rewrite of 
the engine.  Is this something that should be worked on for the 1.6 release?
  I have never used Finale nor Sibelius, but I have used some tab-only 
programs.  They were also hard to use.

  I re-read my message and I realized I said "we" a lot when I haven't put a 
single line of code into the project.  I really need to say something. Thank 
you all for writing such a quality piece of software.  I love it!

  Tim

  <>< Truth