GNU LilyPond

Welcome to the home of the GNU Music Typesetter

GNU LilyPond

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GNU LilyPond -- The music typesetter

LilyPond produces sheet music from input files. This document describes how to use LilyPond.

A further source of information is the website, which can be found at http://www.lilypond.org/. The website contains on-line copies of this and other documentation.

We would like to dedicate this program to all the friends that we met through music.

Han-Wen and Jan

• Preface: Preface.
• Tutorial: A tutorial introduction to LilyPond.
• Reference Manual: Reference Manual.
• Invoking LilyPond: Operation.
• Bug reports: Where to report bugs.
• ly2dvi: Generating nice output with titles.
• convert-ly: Upgrading input files.
• Conversion tools: Converting to lilypond source format.
• lilypond-book: Interleaving text with music.
• Internals: How it all works.
• Literature: Additional reading
• Index of internals: Auto generated detailed documentation.
• Index: Unified index.
• Function Index: Function index.
• Refman appendix:
• GNU Free Documentation License: FDL.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Tutorial
  • First steps
  • Simple legend
  • Running LilyPond
  • The first real tune
  • Lyrics and chords
  • More movements
  • A piano excerpt
  • An orchestral score
    • The full score
    • Extracting an individual part
  • Other ways to run LilyPond
  • Integrating text and music
  • End of tutorial
• Reference Manual
  • Overview
  • Note entry
    • Notes
    • Pitches
    • Rests
    • Skips
    • Durations
    • Ties
    • Tuplets
    • Defining pitch names
    • Easy Notation note heads
  • Staff notation
    • Key signature
    • Clef
    • Time signature
    • Unmetered music
    • Bar lines
  • Polyphony
  • Beaming
  • Expressive marks
    • Slurs
    • Phrasing slurs
    • Breath marks
    • Tempo
    • Text spanners
  • Ornaments
    • Articulations
    • Text scripts
    • Grace notes
    • Glissando
    • Dynamics
  • Repeats
    • Repeat syntax
    • Manual repeat commands
    • Tremolo repeats
    • Tremolo subdivisions
    • Measure repeats
  • Rhythmic music
    • Rhythmic staffs
  • Piano music
    • Automatic staff changes
    • Manual staff switches
    • Pedals
    • Arpeggio
    • Voice follower lines
  • Lyrics
    • Lyrics mode
    • Printing lyrics
    • Automatic syllable durations
    • More stanzas
  • Chords
    • Chords mode
    • Printing named chords
  • Writing parts
    • Rehearsal marks
    • Bar numbers
    • Instrument names
    • Transpose
    • Sound output for transposing instruments
    • Multi measure rests
    • Automatic part combining
    • Hara kiri staffs
  • Custodes
  • Tuning output
    • Tuning groups of grobs
    • Tuning per grob
    • What to tune?
    • Font selection
    • Text markup
    • Invisible grobs
    • Dirty tricks
  • Page layout
    • Paper block
    • Paper variables
    • Font Size
    • Paper size
    • Line break
    • Page break
    • Output scaling
  • Output formats
    • TeX output
    • PostScript output
    • Scheme output
    • ASCIIScript output
  • Sound
    • MIDI block
    • MIDI instrument names
  • Music entry
    • Relative
    • Bar check
    • Point and click
  • Skipping corrected music
  • Interpretation context
    • Creating contexts
    • Default contexts
    • Context properties
    • Engravers and performers
    • Changing context definitions
    • Defining new contexts
  • Syntactic details
    • Top level
    • Identifiers
    • Music expressions
    • Manipulating music expressions
      • Span requests
    • Assignments
    • Lexical modes
    • Ambiguities
  • Lexical details
    • Comments
    • Direct Scheme
    • Keywords
    • Integers
    • Reals
    • Strings
    • Main input
    • File inclusion
    • Version information
• Internals
  • Input location
  • Moment
  • Duration
  • Pitch data type
  • Music
  • Music_iterator
  • Translator
  • Grobs
    • What is a grob?
    • Callbacks
    • Setting grob properties
    • Grob interfaces
    • Items and Spanners
    • Grob Scheme functions
  • Molecules
  • Font metrics
  • Miscellaneous Scheme functions
• Invoking LilyPond
• Bug reports
• ly2dvi
• convert-ly
• lilypond-book
• Conversion tools
  • midi2ly
  • etf2ly
  • abc2ly
  • pmx2ly
  • musedata2ly
  • mup2ly
• Literature
• Index
• Function Index
• Refman appendix
  • Lyrics mode definition
  • American Chords
  • Jazz chords
  • MIDI instruments
• GNU Free Documentation License

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.