Tue 24 Jul 2012 02:35:11 PM UTC, original submission:
Using 0.9.5 rc2 on Windows
I am going to break the golden rule and use 1 bug to record what could be multiple problems.
They are all cosmetic problems with Score Layout.
They can all be postponed to a later release.
They will probably be fixed at the same time - one way or another.
1) My first impressions of Score Layout was "I shouldn't be here!". If that is my impression, what would a non-technical user think? This new feature has the potential to move the user further away from raw Lilypond. You need to make the user want to use this feature. I am not a GUI expert so I can't tell you what to do to achieve this. I can just say it looks wrong and that is more that just the normal case of everybody thinking that the gui should be different (that part follows!).
2) For each staff, you have a graphic showing the clef used in the denemo score. However if you change the clef in the score, it doesn't change in the Score Layout. So you can have different layouts telling different things about the common score. They do change eventually but it might take shut down and restart of denemo.
3) Still on the clef graphic. This is shown as a button. You can press it and nothing happens. I can't think what you could do with such a button so if it is just for information, it shouldn't be a button.
4) When you open up voices the buttons for the Music for voice do not line up. The 1st or only voice is to the right due to the Initial Signatures. The second voice is to the left underneath the Initial Signatures.
5) When you open the Initial Signature, the height of the button for Music for Voice 1 increases. That doesn't look right. A similar thing happens with the graphic for clef, the 2 arrows and the various X boxes but it doesn't look as bad for them. Perhaps fixing 4) will also fix 5).
6)There is something about the X boxes that doesn't look right - yet they do exactly what you would expect them to do so I have no idea what it is that I don't like!
7) Personally I don't mind writing bits of Lilypond. I can & do add scripts and insert directive manually. I don't even mind that I am specifying notes in what I believe is the Dutch notation i.e. bes for b flat. However I am not, or at least should not, be your target user. I am (was) a programmer and a musician (as I expect most of the development team are). The target user should just be a musician whose technical knowledge stops at the point where they load the application. In other words you have to hide the Lilypond syntax as far as possible. The problem with that is the more you hide it, the more you loose of Lilypond's flexibility. I could say that when editing e.g. the composer, the user should only type in the name but I sometimes want /bold or even /column etc. Perhaps you could scan the user's input, if it is just ordinary letter, wrap it in quotes and put the <keyword> = in front of it. If it contains back slashes then wrap in braces and put <keyword> = \markup in front.
If you you look at print transpose, you have a way to specify the transposition where the user only needs to know how to specify the interval. Within Score Layout, the user is expected to edit the start of the Staff block.
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