GNU LilyPond

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Node:ASCIIScript output, Previous:Scheme output, Up:Output formats

ASCIIScript output

LilyPond can output ASCII Art. This is a two step process, LilyPond produces an ASCII description file, dubbed ASCIIScript (extension .as). ASCIIScript has a small and simple command set that includes font selection, character and string printing and line drawing commands. The program as2text is used to translate an .as file to text.

To produce ASCII Art, you must include an ASCII Art paper definition file in your .ly, one of:

\include "paper-as5.ly"
\include "paper-as9.ly"

Here's an example use for ASCII Art output (the example file as-email.ly is included in the LilyPond distribution), the staff symbol has been made invisible:

$ lilypond -fas as-email.ly
GNU LilyPond 1.3.144
Now processing: `as-email.ly'
Parsing...
Interpreting music...[3]
Preprocessing elements...
Calculating column positions... [2]
paper output to as-email.as...

$ as2text as-email.as 2>/dev/null
          |\
          |/     |##|##|      |  |  |  |  |
         /|      |  |  | |    |\ |\ |\ |\ |\ |
        / |_  3  |  |  | | 5  | )| )| )| )| )|
       | /| \ 8 *  *  *  | 8 *  *  *  *  *   |
        \_|_/            |                   |
        *_|

                                               lily

BUGS

The ASCII Art fonts are far from complete and not very well designed. It's easy to change the glyphs, though; if you think you can do better, have a look at mf/*.af.

Lots of resizable symbols such as slurs, ties and tuplets are missing.

The poor looks of most ASCII Art output and its limited general usefulness gives ASCII Art output a low priority; it may be dropped in future versions.

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.