I think the big question is whether you are dealing with music or scores. a .ly file represents not the music, but the music plus typographic annotations (and I find that even lilypond quite often benefits from hints). Most gui programs represent scores, but I think lilypond stands alone in that among text formats. So the question, to me, is whether you need a representation of music, or of a score; if of music, I would choose an input format other than lilypond (abc recommends itself from my folk-music background), using an appropriate backend for rudimentary typesetting. But if you need the full layout flexibility, I doubt you can beat writing straight lilypond: I have yet to see a frontend produce easily hand-edited lilypond source (which I find very quickly becomes a featureless blob without judicious use of whitespace), nor one that exposes the flexibility of the lilypond engine (and I find lilypond much faster to write than Finale, and little slower than Mozart's superb keyboard entry (not being a keyboardist, I cannot speak for midi entry)). haskore and hly I would reserve for internal representations for conversion or transformation programs; I think there are much better alternatives for human writing. I would also be careful with excessively "mathematical" representations; before finding lilypond, I had to discard more than one program for failure to handle irregular meters. ________________________________________ From: Haskell-Cafe [haskell-cafe-bounces@haskell.org] on behalf of Rustom Mody [rustompmody@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2013 10:46 AM To: Johannes Waldmann Cc: Haskell Cafe Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] haskore -> lilypond -> typesetting?