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I'm also looking for copywrite/publishing schtuffs for my pieces (maybe I can get a small income of them if they actually sell )

As for engravement... Some people have impossible handwriting (suprisingly, I don't). Computer generated scores just look nicer and tend to be more readable.

I suppose that is one advantage of using computer engraving. Plus, any engraving errors can be easily corrected with a few clicks of a button.

It took me years to get to the point where I could enter a score into Finale and learn enough formatting tricks to make it look readable. A lot of the default settings for beaming and slurs are very ugly, but with enough tweaking you can get them to look "correct". The biggest problem is that it can't do everything well... Beaming across bar lines is a total mess (at least in Finale 2007) and the formatting can easily get completely ruined. The learning curve is much longer and steeper with software compared to using your own hands I don't have any experience with Sibelius, maybe they do it better. And I haven't bothered with Lilypond... As nice as the scores look, I get the feeling that when engraving with Lilypond, 95% of your time is spent getting the code to function correctly.

From experience, I find that for general notation Finale is much more user friendly, but for more advanced, Sibelius is probably slightly better.

What about Encore? I used it before and I think it looks nice. But nowadays people use Finale and Sibelius more often. I'm hopeful that once the programmers of Lilypond can get it to function on its own (correct it's own errors), we can typeset any sort of music into it without doing any tweaking.

The fact that SCORE and Lilypond isn't WYSIWYG is what turns a lot of people, including me, away from it.

I just spent a bit of last night reading through Lilypond tutorials. With their current stable release, their examples didn't compile, or compiled with errors I'm torn about that program, because I've seen some of the things that it can do pretty easily, like true beaming across the bar line, contemporary time signature notation, and some other modern techniques (and it's free!), but getting slurs to look right is probably a nightmare. It would be nice if they could somehow make a GUI front end at some point.

The unstable (2.11) has so many little improvements that you should just use it instead of the current stable. There has also been a big effort to improve the documentation.

Most of the time you don't need to mess with slurs, but the first time you need to it does take some effort and trial and error. This is like most of lilypond. It gets easier.

I don't think there will ever be an official front end to lilypond. There are a few unofficial ones out there. Though I haven't found one I liked better than just using a text editor. If you wanted you could even use finale as a front end. Just export to musicxml.

horndude 77: I just installed the latest unstable release (running Ubuntu linux), and used musicxml2ly to convert the .xml file exported from Finale. The results aren't quite right:

http://www.simonbielman.com/pdf/sonata_2_lilypond.pdf

Everything's fine at first, but at measure 84 something really funny happens in the left hand, and the entire staff gets off by at least one measure for the rest of the piece. At the beginning of the second movement, it's WAY off. Plus a trill I've written now goes on forever And my accidental spelling wasn't preserved, hmm...

But I guess all these problems are the XML converter's fault. The notation itself, besides the odd placement of rests, looks pretty nice. Maybe I'll have better luck getting lilypond code to compile in this version...

You might want to post this to the lilypond user list and see what they have to say. It looks like it converted it most of they way there. The musicxml converter has improved greatly recently, but it obviously still has a long way to go.