Re: procedures with setters: patches

[Reuben Thomas]

> I'm ambivalent. The danger is that the number of functions to create
> and manipulate data structures explodes, and becomes harder to
> learn. We have to find a balance between having a small "interface"
> and an interface that is ultra-ergonomic to use.

I think at the moment that Lilypond is a bit low-level, as I hinted
before. What is needed is essentially the raw materials for making a style
sheet. I found the settings in Sibelius under "House style" helpful for
this: there are a lot of them, but they are all obvious, and most of the
time, the setting exists for the thing you want to do. Hence, it is not
too difficult to look in the index of the manual (or just scan down the
menus in the GUI) to find what you want. The options are all very
specific and simple (e.g. what font for expression markings? should
rehearsal figures be numbers or letters? how often to put bar numbers?).

Of course, you can still build particular stylesheets (like in LaTeX), but
it is so much nicer if you don't have to start with raw LilyPond. (Rather
like the memoir class in LaTeX, if anyone knows that: it is essentially a
customisable document class that lets you do a wide range of things for
"sensible" documents, without needing an understanding of how to program
LaTeX macros).

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