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GNU LilyPond

Welcome to the home of the GNU Music Typesetter

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(Oct / 99) * What is it? In short, LilyPond does for sheet music what (La)TeX does for printed text: the input describes the music you want printed, the program processes the input like a compiler, and the output file contains printed music. * Who would use it? People who want beautifully printed music, but don't have time to learn intricacies of music notation. * Why would they use it instead of similar projects? Within the free software movement, LilyPond is unique: free music notation software is very scarce, and is either difficult to use, clumsy or does not give pretty results. * Special features/strengths? Just like LaTeX, the input format is very abstract, and the output is very elegant. Additionally, most aspects of the formatting can be adjusted to taste. LilyPond also allows very easy integration with TeX: you can write a paper that mixes fragments of notation with LaTeX. * Special problems? Music notation is very complicated. It is much more difficult than typesetting mathematics which is TeX's forte. Almost everything in music notation is a "Special problem". Generally, the more modern the music is, the more problems it contains: classical and baroque music like Mozart and Bach should pose no problems for LilyPond. Romantic music like Brahms and Schumann will get printed but with some formatting errors. Twentieth century music like Schoenberg and Bartok can be very difficult to typeset. Luckily for most, Pop-music is relatively uncomplicated: it should not be a problem to print that kind of music. * Who is working on it? Jan Nieuwenhuizen and me (Han-Wen Nienhuys) have written most of the core of the program, but the most elaborate example in the distribution (a 40 page orchestral score) was contributed by one of our long-time users. He is a member of a small band of developers that contribute small patches. * Plans for the close and distant future? The most concrete development plan for now is to use GUILE much more pervasively: LilyPond started out as a C++ program, with lots of formatting rules that were hard-wired into the system. We want to express those rules in Scheme, so that they can be changed at run-time. A much more interesting development is The Mutopia Project: it is a website where you can download sheet music that has passed into the public domain. Just think of Project Gutenberg, but then for sheet music. We hope that in the future you can just point your browser to Mutopia if you need classical music. The Mutopia website has not gone live yet, but you can preview some scores at http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/. What we need now is lots of help with entering sheet music. If you like classical music, come out and help us! * Interesting/fun stories that might juice up the story? Jan Nieuwenhuizen and me have been best friends for a some four years now. LilyPond development catalyses our friendship, and our friendship catalyses LilyPond development. We call each other a few times a week to discuss development, and the most revolutionary improvements in Lily have often been the result of a long nights of discussions on software design over glasses of Whisky Another question that pops up in outsiders is: ``what do aquatic flowers have to do with music typography? Why the weird name?'' I started Lily (our affectionate name for LilyPond) three years ago. Back then, I was in an amateur symphonic orchestra together with Jan. I had a crush on this magnificent girl in the orchestra: her name was Suzanne, she played both the flute and the cello, and (of course) I thought she was very pretty. At the time, Jan was dating Roos (Dutch for `Rose' -- she also played the cello). I also knew about about a package Rosegarden (a GUI MIDI sequencer and notation editor). When I found out that `Susan' is Hebrew for `lily', I decided that calling the package `LilyPond' would match make the nomenclature of the rest of my life perfectly. Some things don't last---the two girls, the cellos and the orchestra, all have disappeared from our lives. LilyPond however has survived over time. It is a big, mature program with a healthy user-base and good prospects. Best of all is, that we still have a good time hacking on it * License?! GPL, of course.
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Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

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