lilypond-learning: Other sources of information
4.7.4 Other sources of information
----------------------------------
The Internals Reference documentation contains a lot of information
about LilyPond, but even more information can be gathered by looking at
the internal LilyPond files. To explore these, you must first find the
directory appropriate to your system. The location of this directory
depends (a) on whether you obtained LilyPond by downloading a
precompiled binary from lilypond.org or whether you installed it from a
package manager (i.e. distributed with GNU/Linux, or installed under
fink or cygwin) or compiled it from source, and (b) on which operating
system it is being used:
Downloaded from lilypond.org
............................
• GNU/Linux
Navigate to
INSTALLDIR/lilypond/usr/share/lilypond/current/
• MacOS X
Navigate to
INSTALLDIR/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/
by either ‘cd’-ing into this directory from the Terminal, or
control-clicking on the LilyPond application and selecting ‘Show
Package Contents’.
• Windows
Using Windows Explorer, navigate to
INSTALLDIR/LilyPond/usr/share/lilypond/current/
Installed from a package manager or compiled from source
........................................................
Navigate to ‘PREFIX/share/lilypond/X.Y.Z/’, where PREFIX is set by your
package manager or ‘configure’ script, and X.Y.Z is the LilyPond version
number.
Within this directory the two interesting subdirectories are
• ‘ly/’ - contains files in LilyPond format
• ‘scm/’ - contains files in Scheme format
Let’s begin by looking at some files in ‘ly/’. Open
‘ly/property-init.ly’ in a text editor. The one you normally use for
‘.ly’ files will be fine. This file contains the definitions of all the
standard LilyPond predefined commands, such as ‘\stemUp’ and
‘\slurDotted’. You will see that these are nothing more than
definitions of variables containing one or a group of ‘\override’
commands. For example, ‘/tieDotted’ is defined to be:
tieDotted = {
\override Tie.dash-period = #0.75
\override Tie.dash-fraction = #0.1
}
If you do not like the default values these predefined commands can
be redefined easily, just like any other variable, at the head of your
input file.
The following are the most useful files to be found in ‘ly/’:
Filename Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘ly/engraver-init.ly’ Definitions of engraver Contexts
‘ly/paper-defaults-init.ly’ Specifications of paper-related defaults
‘ly/performer-init.ly’ Definitions of performer Contexts
‘ly/property-init.ly’ Definitions of all common predefined
commands
‘ly/spanner-init.ly’ Definitions of spanner-related predefined
commands
Other settings (such as the definitions of markup commands) are
stored as ‘.scm’ (Scheme) files. The Scheme programming language is
used to provide a programmable interface into LilyPond internal
operation. Further explanation of these files is currently outside the
scope of this manual, as a knowledge of the Scheme language is required.
Users should be warned that a substantial amount of technical knowledge
or time is required to understand Scheme and these files (see 
(lilypond-extending)Scheme tutorial).
If you have this knowledge, the Scheme files which may be of interest
are:
Filename Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘scm/auto-beam.scm’ Sub-beaming defaults
‘scm/define-grobs.scm’ Default settings for grob properties
‘scm/define-markup-commands.scm’Specify all markup commands
‘scm/midi.scm’ Default settings for MIDI output
‘scm/output-lib.scm’ Settings that affect appearance of frets,
colors, accidentals, bar lines, etc
‘scm/parser-clef.scm’ Definitions of supported clefs
‘scm/script.scm’ Default settings for articulations
Info Catalog
lilypond-learning: Style sheets
lilypond-learning: Further tweaking
lilypond-learning: Advanced tweaks with Scheme