Does anyone use LilyPond for music engraving?

[aquinas138]

I am driving myself insane, I believe. I am trying to assemble a booklet for Small Compline for my parish that has our parish propers in it. I am fairly ignorant musically - I can identify a note, and that's about it. Anyway, I am using LaTeX (TeXShop) and LilyPond to produce the musical notation. It works pretty well, but trying to format it is maddening. I am having trouble with spacing:

Mine looks like this:



But I want it to look more like this:



Unfortunately, I don't know how to allow the bar to carry to the next line, and LilyPond's automatic choices look bad. If anyone can help, I'll post my code.

[Gardener]

I've sent this thread link to the music director at the parish. I'll let ya know what he says.

[aquinas138]

I've sent this thread link to the music director at the parish. I'll let ya know what he says.

Thank you very much.

[Gardener]

Howdy.

He replied:

"Lily pond is not user friendly,  Sibelius is probably your best bet.  I've used Encore for years but if I had to learn another software to start over again I'd use Sibelius.  ... "

If you want, I'll PM you with his contact info in case you have more questions or just want to compare musician notes.

edit: fix typo