lilypond-essay: Putting LilyPond to work
1.5 Putting LilyPond to work
============================
We have written LilyPond as an experiment of how to condense the art of
music engraving into a computer program. Thanks to all that hard work,
the program can now be used to perform useful tasks. The simplest
application is printing notes.
[image src="" alt="[image of music]" text="image of music" ]
By adding chord names and lyrics we obtain a lead sheet.
[image src="" alt="[image of music]" text="image of music" ]
Polyphonic notation and piano music can also be printed. The
following example combines some more exotic constructs.
[image src="" alt="[image of music]" text="image of music" ]
The fragments shown above have all been written by hand, but that is
not a requirement. Since the formatting engine is mostly automatic, it
can serve as an output means for other programs that manipulate music.
For example, it can also be used to convert databases of musical
fragments to images for use on websites and multimedia presentations.
This manual also shows an application: the input format is text, and
can therefore be easily embedded in other text-based formats such as
LaTeX, HTML, or in the case of this manual, Texinfo. Using the
‘lilypond-book’ program, included with LilyPond, the input fragments can
be replaced by music images in the resulting PDF or HTML output files.
Another example is the third-party OOoLilyPond extension for
OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice, which makes it extremely easy to embed
musical examples in documents.
For more examples of LilyPond in action, full documentation, and the
software itself, see our main website: www.lilypond.org.
Info Catalog
lilypond-essay: Building software
lilypond-essay: Music engraving
lilypond-essay: Engraved examples (BWV 861)