Toplevel README

LilyPond is a music typesetter. It produces beautiful sheet music using a 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.

Downloading

The primary download site for sourcecode is http://lilypond.org/download/.

If you have a slow connection, then you are advised to use xdelta for patching source archives; Xdelta (.xd) files are supplied on the FTP site.

Compilation

For compiling and running LilyPond see the installation instructions. These instructions can be found when you unpack lilypond, as lilypond-x.y.z/INSTALL.txt. They are also available on the web at http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.1/Documentation/topdocs/out-www/INSTALL.html.

NOTE: If you downloaded a binary (.rpm) or use the Cygwin setup.exe program, then you don't have to compile LilyPond.

Documentation

The documentation is available online at http://www.lilypond.org/doc/.

You can also build it locally: follow the instructions under `Building documentation' in the installation instructions.

Comments

Send your criticism, comments, bugreports, patches, etc. to the mailing list, not to us personally.

We have the following mailing lists:

You can search the lists from the following page: searching facilities.

Caveats

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

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

a script to do this is left after compiling in buildscripts/out/clean-fonts.

Bugs

Send bug reports to bug-lilypond@gnu.org. For help and questions use lilypond-user@gnu.org.

Read comments on this page, or add one.

This page is for LilyPond-2.2.0 (stable-branch).

Report errors to <bug-lilypond@gnu.org>.