Does anyone use LilyPond ? Essentially it does a similar job to Finale and Sibelius, in that the end result is printed sheet music. But instead of having a graphical user interface, you write the music in any plain text editor in a scripting language and it will output sheet music in PDF, PNG, postscript, or whatever format you like. It is free and open source and frequently updated, so you can modify it how you like if you can program.

It certainly produces incredible looking sheet music, arguably better than what Finale and Sibelius can produce. I've started having a play around with it, and it's complex looking to begin with but very powerful.

Also, if you're on Linux, there are some front ends you can use for it such as Rosegarden . I haven't tried these extensively yet though, as my switch to Linux from Windows is still pending!

I can't figure it out and never could.