Previous: Example applications, Up: Introduction
FIXME: needs almost-complete rewrite. -gp
There are four manuals about LilyPond: the Learning Manual, the Notation Reference, the Application Usage, and the Internals Reference.
This book explains how to begin learning LilyPond, as well as explaining some key concepts in easy terms. It is recommended to read these chapters in a linear fashion.
This book explains all the LilyPond commands which produce notation. It assumes that readers are familiar with the concepts in the Learning manual.
All of this needs to be rewritten after GDP, anyway.
This book explains how to execute the program and how to integrate LilyPond notation with other programs.
.ly
format.
There are a number of other places which may be very valuable.
Almost all formatting functionality that is used internally, is available directly to the user. For example, all variables that control thickness values, distances, etc., can be changed in input files. There are a huge number of formatting options, and all of them are described in this document. Each section of the notation manual has a See also subsection, which refers to the generated documentation. In the HTML document, these subsections have clickable links.
Once you are an experienced user, you can use the manual as reference: there is an extensive index1, but the document is also available in one big page, which can be searched easily using the search facility of a web browser.
In all HTML documents that have music fragments embedded, the LilyPond input that was used to produce that image can be viewed by clicking the image.
The location of the documentation files that are mentioned here can vary from system to system. On occasion, this manual refers to initialization and example files. Throughout this manual, we refer to input files relative to the top-directory of the source archive. For example, input/lsr/dirname/bla.ly may refer to the file lilypond2.x.y/input/lsr/dirname/bla.ly. On binary packages for the Unix platform, the documentation and examples can typically be found somewhere below /usr/share/doc/lilypond/. Initialization files, for example scm/lily.scm, or ly/engraver-init.ly, are usually found in the directory /usr/share/lilypond/.
Finally, this and all other manuals, are available online both as PDF files and HTML from the web site, which can be found at http://www.lilypond.org/.
[1] If you are looking for something, and you cannot find it in the manual, that is considered a bug. In that case, please file a bug report.
Previous: Example applications, Up: Introduction
This page is for LilyPond-2.11.40 (development-branch).
Report errors to http://post.gmane.org/post.php?group=gmane.comp.gnu.lilypond.bugs.
Your suggestions for the documentation are welcome.