LilyPond (http://lilypond.org/) is cetrainly the music typesetter with the best output. This mainly for 2 reasons:
The developers made a lot of effort to create special music fonts, which are derived from traditional music printing. They even created their own tools for font format conversion to get the best results.
LilyPond uses a multi pass technique which takes as much time as necessary to perform an excellent placement of the musical symbols.
Furthermore, LilyPond has a lot of music orthographical knowledge, which prevents notation errors.
LilyPond creates a PostScript or PDF output from a file which contains a text transcription of the music. For example, the input:
\relative c' { \clef treble \key d \major
d4 e fis g a b cis d
}
causes the following output:
NtEd can create the LilyPond text transcription. Choose:
→
Choose a File name! The suffix should be .ly
.
This feature is still experimental.
To produce a PostScript or PDF output from this file install LilyPond and type:
lilypond
<filename>.ly
To preview and/or print the output use your preferred view/print commands (gv, ggv, evince, xpdf, lpr, kprinter, ...).
As mentioned above, LilyPond uses its own placement strategie and its own fonts. As a consequence the WYSIWYG principle is broken. The output differs from NtEd score.