A while back, James brought the free, GNU Project software, engraving program LilyPond to my attention. At first, I quickly grew impatient with learning this coding-style, text-input format of this program, and I abandoned it. But, recently, I’ve come back to it, with renewed interest in making my scores and parts much more professional-looking and appealing for those who purchase and read from them.
I laugh, because all it took for me to regain hope in my learning how to use LilyPond’s interface, was taking an hour or two to carefully read merely the first few chapters of the introductory manual. That’s all I needed to get a solid handle on how to think in the text-based terms of this new coding world! Lesson learned: Don’t give up on something until you at least have read the first few pages of the tutorial! 
Well, in my spare time here and there throughout this week, I have completed the uploading and tweaking and perfecting of the score to Image 2 from my Courage Triptych: “Broken Innocence”. [Note: Completing my score in MuseScore, another free graphic notation system, allows me to save the MuseScore file in a format that LilyPond can read; thus I can simply import, rather starting from scratch… Although, I do anticipate getting to know LilyPond so well that, one day, I may just use the text-based system entirely from the beginning… Wouldn’t that be wild?]
Check out the first page below… This engraving really puts the professional edge on it! And, once you get the hang of how to read the text system, everything else is done automatically, with freedom for you to adjust elements as necessary. It’s a really great system so far — I look forward to eventually converting ALL my available scores and parts to this LilyPond engraving system.
