A notation & software anorak (with burning ears) reappears very, very briefly to say ...
Richard: if you want your computer notated scores to look like your handwritten scores, you need Finale. But you also need to be prepared to fight the software (as one does
). It'll allow you to produce scores & parts that look like you want them to look, but the learning curve is extremely steep.
Sibelius does what it says on the tin -- it's easy and it's direct. You'll be able to produce feasible parts out of the box, and they'll look more or less like what average orchestral players want to see. (To be fair, the same is now true of Finale, as well.) Sibelius thinks it's much, much smarter than you are, and it thinks it knows what your scores should look like, and it's rather cumbersome to adjust those presets, as hh's demonstration shows (all that work was done for a single bar, if I'm reading it correctly. How many bars is your orchestra piece?). There are available workarounds in Sibelius, but my own experience has been that Finale is a substantially more flexible and powerful piece of software when it comes to engraving -- it's actually possible to get it to look like you want it to look like. (I've been amused to see this whole exchange about straight flags, for example. I've been using straight flags for a decade now in Finale w/o any trouble at all.)
The defaults (particularly w/ regard to spacing!) are appallingly bad for both programs -- given that, I'd say that the decision would have to be based on the flexibility the program offers to
undo those defaults.
As far as I can tell, my scores couldn't be created in Sibelius. The full score of the snippet Ollie posted can be seen
here. Useful to see what the whole discussion of controlled bar widths actually looks like in practice. Surely some of the expert Sibelius users here could produce this score -- the question is how labor-intensive the process is.
Sincerely hope you're all well!
Back to my cave.