Over several years, mostly since this thread started, I've found three or four fairly inexpensive programs quite capable of very professional music layout and printing – within the limits of everything I've been interested in doing. Unfortunately, whenever a reasonably priced program appears and gets well enough known to be recommended, each gets "purchased" by one of the major software publishers and "rendered obsolete," usually by stopping sales and stopping support. The next new OS release quickly renders the abandoned older programs unusable.

Since the layout of music for display and printing is largely "graphic," and the programs are full of shortcuts and specialized utilities for placing, sizing, spacing, and editing lots of "glyphs," the result is that files generally are saved in "proprietary" formats unreadable by other (newer) programs.

The major program publishers generally produce "cheaper" programs for special and more limited needs; but it can be difficult to define exactly what features your own use requires, and then to find a specific program that provides most (almost never all) of your needed features among the things offered. (Quite obviously, no publisher wants to offer a $3 program that does everything their $800 program can do, and it's to their advantage to "omit" at least a few things that even the simpler program should do – even for the least demanding users with limited needs – in order to encourage "upgrading" to the more profitable ones.)

It's easy enough for a user who's found a program that does "everything" that user needs to do his/her thing, and to recommend it to others; but it can be very difficult for the "others" to find pre-acquisition assurance that they need/want exactly the same features, and that a recommended program really has all of what they want.

Regardless of what program is used, or what it is capable of doing, you're unlikely to produce "professional quality" scores unless you know what good scores should look like, and for some purposes it may be necessary to know at least a bit about "traditions" of the music publishing business.

Regardless of how much we think we know about "scoring," most of us from can benefit from having a good, professional grade reference book to check out whether we're "doing it right" when questions pop up. One that I found some time ago, and that I can recommend, is Music Notation by Read, published by Taplinger, ISBN 0-8008-5453-5. My copy was $19.95 (US) from Barnes in 1996. I would expect that it is still in publication, although it's been perhaps a year since I've seen it on the bookstore shelves. I'm sure, if you find it, that it will be a little more expensive now; but it's been very much "worth having on the shelf" for me.

John