Wish I'd Taken The Text Route Instead Of The Graphic One Twenty So Years Ago

that is instead of going with the now totally defunct Finale music publishing program.  I liked Finale well enough though it was expensive, clunky,  often didn't exactly work exactly as advertised and in some ways was very frustrating.   I wasn't exactly thrilled with its graphic-base which I'm pretty disillusioned with - though I have been experimenting with MuseScore as a replacement.  But the most frustrating thing about it was that after decades of investment into it in work and buying updates,  the goddamned company that made it discontinued it making a deal with another outfit for a whole different replacement that I'd have to buy and which doesn't look to me to be compatible with my previous work preserved in a soon to be useless format.   I'm now suspicious of anything that might get pulled out from under such an investment in work and money which I think any graphic-based music engraving program will probably turn out to be.    But there was and still is an alternative that is free, open-source and text-based - making it far, far more flexible and portable in that the score is contained in a text file that can be moved on to any platform and stored that way.   And Lilypond is available for all of the main operating systems and hardware architectures.   I haven't tried to take a text file from one to another to see if the portability is 100% but I'm betting it is. 

I've started, in my old age, to learn Lilypond programming for music engraving and am shocked to find that once you've learned the commands,  it's far, far easier to use than any graphic-based program I've tried,  and I've tried about four of those.   It has its limits though if I were smart enough to program what I wanted into it,  those could be overcome.   I've been working on a major project which is still in the pencil on music paper stage,  I think I'll try to put it into print with Lilypond instead of the alternatives.   Granted I won't be able to take advantage of some of the features of those  but I'm guessing I'll be able to use the simple find and replace features of one of the simple text editors I use to do a lot of that.  And I may find someone has already programmed that feature into it somewhere.     If it works I'll let you know but if I was advising a student on such things these days,  I'd suggest they try it out and see if it works for them.   One thing,  I'd advise them never to invest years of work into a complex graphic interface or other such complex program because you never know when some company or owner of it will pull the whole thing down.