As a result, note heads become more rounded, and staff lines become thicker. Optical font scaling: depending on the staff size, the design of the music font is slightly altered this is a feature that Donald Knuth's Computer Modern font is known for.An essay from the LilyPond website, written by LilyPond developers, explains some typographical issues addressed by LilyPond: LilyPond's primary goal is to produce output comparable to professionally engraved scores instead of output that looks mechanical and computer-generated. 5 music sheet printed from a digitally engraved PDF file produced by LilyPond released by the Mutopia Project Software featuresīeethoven's Symphony No. Its guitar facilities support alternative tunings, such as major-thirds tuning. LilyPond supports experimental musical notation.

LilyPond adheres to the WYSIWYM paradigm the workflow for typesetting music notation with LilyPond is similar to that of preparing documents with LaTeX. (However, a text-editor based 'LilyPad' GUI for Windows and MacOS is included by default on these systems.) It does, however, have a flexible input language that strives to be simple, easing the learning curve for new users. LilyPond is a text-based application, so it does not contain its own graphical user interface to assist with score creation. LilyPond can also generate MIDI files that correspond to the music notation output. In the final stage, music notation is output to PDF (via PostScript) or other graphical formats, such as SVG or PNG. It uses a simple text notation for music input, which LilyPond interprets and processes in a series of stages. It has a relatively large codebase as of March 10, 2017, the source includes over 600,000 lines of C++, 140,000 lines of Scheme, and 120,000 lines of Python code. LilyPond is mostly written in C++ and uses Scheme (interpreted by GNU Guile) as its extension language, allowing for user customization.

LilyPond 2.0 was released on September 24, 2003, announcing a simplified syntax model and a much more complete set of facilities for notating various styles of music. LilyPond 1.0 was released on July 31, 1998, highlighting the development of a custom music font, Feta, and the complete separation of LilyPond from MusiXTeX. Its name was inspired both by the Rosegarden project and an acquaintance of Nienhuys and Nieuwenhuizen named Suzanne, a name that means lily in Hebrew ( שׁוֹשַׁנָּה). The LilyPond project was started in 1996 by Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen, after they decided to abandon work on MPP ( MusiXTeX PreProcessor), a project they began collaborating on in 1995. 6.2 Integration into text using lilypond-book.

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