Comments on various details/topics

[uliska]

Janek Warchol:

As for the text, here are my remarks so far (btw, is this already in a git repo? If so, maybe i'd write a pull request):

I'd definitely make it shorter, so that interested people will read it in whole instead of just skimming through it ("because it's too long to read") and ending up being freaked out by the code examples. I'd aim for 12 pages, with 20 being absolute maximum.

"traditionally these [WYSIWYG] programs have binary file formats that usually are more memory efficient" huh?? Maybe i'm missign something, but binary/XML files are bigger and don't compress. See http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2012/05/21/why-plain-text/ (this may give you some addtional arguments for plain text, and it's an interesting blog anyway)

I meant that binary (not XML) file formats have a higher runtime efficiency, can be more efficiently mapped to memory (not storage).

"This may not seem necessary in this example, but you’ll appreciate it when the diff shows you exactly the seven changed lines in a file with more than 2.000 lines." Speak of pages, not lines, so that ordinary people will understand better.

I'd simplify text about floats a lot.

Mention Helmholtz pitch notation in the LilyPond syntax intro.

[uliska]

Evan Driscoll:

Lilypond caught my attention when it was sort of described as a "Latex for music", because I'm a pretty big Latex user. But in a very important way, the two tasks are extremely different. When I write a Latex document, Latex goes and adds text formatting and stuff, but... the output just looks like a fancier version of the input. With Lilypond, the source code and output bear basically no direct resemblance to each other.

Because of that, my introduction to the tool was through Denemo, which I viewed basically as "Latex:Lyx::Lilypond:Denemo". (Though I haven't actually really used Lyx. :-)) But then I learned about Frescabaldi and the point-and-click feature that Lilypond supports in general, and suddenly actually editing the textual Lilypond source seemed like a reasonable option. And indeed, that's what I've done since, and it works pretty well.

So in your up-front list of benefits, I think you should also specifically address this worry. Say something like "a lot of the drawbacks you may think of about textual editing are mitigated via editor support" and link to the section of the document where you talk about that.

I think I have done that in the text, but maybe I should find a way to place it in the introduction - along with Janek's remark about the general acceptance.

[uliska]

Evan Driscoll:

(I couldn't find something that presented version control the way I wanted to show it, so I wrote a description. In the unlikely event you want to steal portions of it, feel free; I can drop a creative commons license on it. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~driscoll/software/vcs/index.html)