Building documentation without compiling

The documentation can be built locally without compiling LilyPond binary, if LilyPond is already installed on your system.

From a fresh Git checkout, do

./autogen.sh   # ignore any warning messages
cp GNUmakefile.in GNUmakefile
make -C scripts && make -C python
nice make LILYPOND_EXTERNAL_BINARY=/path/to/bin/lilypond doc

This may break: if a new feature is added with a test file in input/regression, even the latest development release of LilyPond will fail to build the docs.

You may build the manual without building all the input/* stuff (i.e., mostly regression tests): change directory, for example to Documentation/, issue make doc, which will build documentation in a subdirectory out-www from the source files in current directory. In this case, if you also want to browse the documentation in its post-processed form, change back to top directory and issue

make out=www WWW-post