Hi Tobin, > this is a general question for composers using lilypond. at what point in > your process do you generally start engraving? Like most composers coming > from the consumer notation softwares, I'm accustomed to working in pencil > first, but not to completely separating the engraving and composition tasks. > Curious about composer perspectives about this with lilypond.
Because of my [non-optimal] work process/behaviour, I almost always end up composing right into Lilypond: under deadline pressures, I [almost certainly erroneously] feel that I don’t have time left to write out a pencil score and then engrave separately. However, it is my opinion that the more fully one can compose away from any engraving software (perhaps especially Lilypond**??), the better. All other things being equal, I’d rather start engraving with a complete hand-written score — full separation of composition and engraving tasks. > are there strategies for working with a lilypond file while still composing? Especially if there’s a lot of quoting or cutting-and-pasting or \repeat unfold-ing in the score I’m working on, my strategies include iterative printing: engrave a little, print out the score (with skips for gaps), do pencil-work to fill in the gaps, repeat. Hope that helps! Kieren. ** There are many reasons I say “especially”, but the biggest one is how difficult it is to change the fundamental structure of a piece in Lilypond. Working with, say, 40 staves (plus globals, etc.), if you want to (e.g.) add a measure between m. 25 and m. 26, there is usually a whole bunch of grunt work that needs to be done. In other engraving applications, it’s a simple “add a measure here”, wait 2 seconds for the app to do it, and move on. ________________________________ Kieren MacMillan, composer ‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info ‣ email: i...@kierenmacmillan.info _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user