Building documentation

After a successful compile (using make), the documentation can be built by issuing:

make doc

or, to build only the PDF documentation and not the HTML,

make -C Documentation out=www pdf

Note: The first time you run make doc, the process can easily take an hour or more with not much output on the command line.

After this initial build, make doc only makes changes to the documentation where needed, so it may only take a minute or two to test changes if the documentation is already built.

If make doc succeeds, the HTML documentation tree is available in out-www/offline-root/, and can be browsed locally. The documentation can also be inspected in the Documentation/out-www subdirectory.

make doc sends the output from most of the compilation to logfiles. If the build fails for any reason, it should print the name of a logfile, explaining what failed.

make doc compiles the documents for all languages. To save some compile time, the English language documents can be compiled on their own with:

make LANGS='en' doc

Similarly, it is possible to compile a subset of the translated documentation by specifying their language codes on the command line. For example, the French and German translations are compiled with:

make LANGS='de fr' doc

Compilation of documentation in Info format with images can be done separately by issuing:

make info

An issue when switching branches between master and translation is the appearance/disappearance of translated versions of some manuals. If you see such a warning from make:

No rule to make target 'X', needed by 'Y'

Your best bet is to delete the file Y.dep and to try again.


LilyPond Contributor’s Guide v2.25.14 (development-branch).