GNU LilyPond

Welcome to the home of the GNU Music Typesetter

This is the toplevel README to LilyPond

This is the toplevel README to LilyPond

LilyPond is a music typesetter. It produces beautiful sheet music using a high level description file as input. LilyPond is part of the GNU Project.

Versioning

LilyPond uses a versioning scheme similar to the Linux kernel. In a version "x.y.z", an even second number 'y' denotes a stable version. For development versions 'y' is odd.

Version 1.4 is the latest stable release.

Compilation

For compiling and running LilyPond please refer to the installation instructions. These instructions can be found when you unpack lilypond, as lilypond-x.y.z/INSTALL.txt.

NOTE: If you downloaded a binary (.rpm or a W95/NT .zip file), you don't have to compile LilyPond.

Documentation

The documentation is available online at http://www.lilypond.org/. You can also build it locally. This does require a working LilyPond binary. The following formats are supported:

• HTML. Refer to INSTALL.txt for information on how to make the HTML documentation.
• .dvi, for the tutorial and reference manual. Do
  

   make -C Documentation/user/ dvi
  
  

  The printable documentation is left in Documentation/user/out/.
• paper. Create the .dvi documentation, and print it with dvips.

Comments

LilyPond is a long way from finished and polished, so please send your criticism, comments, bugreports, patches, etc., to the mailing list, not to us personally.

We have the following mailing lists:

• info-lilypond@gnu.org is a low-volume list for information on the GNU Music project. This list is moderated; ask David R. Linn or Han-Wen to send announcements for this list.
• lilypond-user@gnu.org For general discussions about using LilyPond.
• bug-lilypond@gnu.org If you have bugreports, you should send them to this list.

Windows 32

If you have received this file as part of a DOS/Window32 distribution (LilyPond-*.zip), it is advisable to also download the source package, since it might contain more documentation

Caveats

If you have installed a previous version, be sure to remove old font files, eg.,

rm `find /var/lib/texmf/fonts -name 'feta*'`

a script to do this for you is in buildscripts/clean-fonts.sh

Bugs

Send bug reports to bug-lilypond@gnu.org. For help and questions use lilypond-user@gnu.org. Please consult the FAQ and installation instructions before mailing your problems.

Please send GNU LilyPond questions and comments to lilypond-user@gnu.org.

Please send comments on these web pages to lilypond@packages.debian.org

Copyright (c) 1997--2001 Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.