lilypond-web: Features
Features
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Elegance
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Excellent classical engraving
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LilyPond allows musicians to produce elegant sheet music that is easy to
read. Its developer community has spent thousands of hours developing
powerful music engraving software that results in beautifully engraved
music. All of LilyPond’s style settings, font designs and algorithms
have been inspired by the finest hand-engraved music. LilyPond output
has the same strong, balanced and elegant look as the best-engraved
classical scores. This is further explained in our 
Essay.
Effective layout choices
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Spend less time with tweaking the output; LilyPond gets the formatting
correct right from the start. It determines spacing by itself, and
breaks lines and pages to provide a tight and uniform layout. Clashes
between lyrics, notes, and chords are resolved and slurs and beams are
sloped, automatically!
Ease of use
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Text-based input
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LilyPond takes ASCII input, which you can produce in your favorite text
editor, quickly and comfortably. The input contains all the
information, so there is no need to remember complex command sequences:
simply save a file for later reference.
Mix music and text
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Put fragments of music into texts without cutting and pasting pictures.
Integrate music into LaTeX and HTML seamlessly, or add music to
OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice with OOoLilyPond. Plugins are also
available to allow LilyPond code in various blogs and wikis, making
online collaboration possible.
Accessibility
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Text-based input also makes score-writing possible for users with severe
physical disabilities. Dexterity-impaired users who are unable to type
or control a computer mouse can use speech-recognition software to edit
LilyPond files. Even users who are totally blind can use screen-reading
software to write LilyPond files – an impossible task in graphical-based
score-writing programs.
Extensible design
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All settings can be changed to suit your personal typographical taste.
If that still is not enough, there is always the built-in scripting
language Scheme, a dialect of the powerful language LISP. Settings,
variables and functions are all documented in the comprehensive program
reference manual.
Environment
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Free software
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LilyPond can be downloaded free of charge! Yep - It’s free. Get it
from the download page.
It’s also free (as in “speech”) software. It comes with source code,
and permission to change and copy it. So, are you irritated by a bug,
or yearning for a feature? Simply add it yourself, or pay someone else
to do it.
Excellent support
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LilyPond runs on all popular platforms: GNU/Linux, MacOS X, and Windows.
LilyPond comes with extensive documentation and hundreds of example
files. There is an active user community answering questions on the
lilypond-user mailing list, while the development team makes sure that
problems are solved quickly.
Enhanced editors
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Several developers, themselves active LilyPond users, have also written
tools specifically aimed at making the process of editing LilyPond files
faster and more effective. For some examples, see Easier
editing.
Where now?
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Still not convinced? Look at some specific Examples. If you’ve
already decided to try LilyPond, first read about our Text
input.
Info Catalog
lilypond-web: Introduction
lilypond-web: Examples