5.6 Tips for writing docs

In the NR, I highly recommend focusing on one subsection at a time. For each subsection,

In general, I favor short text explanations with good examples – “an example is worth a thousand words”. When I worked on the docs, I spent about half my time just working on those tiny lilypond examples. Making easily-understandable examples is much harder than it looks.

Tweaks

In general, any \set or \override commands should go in the “select snippets” section, which means that they should go in LSR and not the .itely file. For some cases, the command obviously belongs in the “main text” (i.e., not inside @predefined or @morerefs or whatever) – instrument names are a good example of this.

\set Staff.instrumentName = "foo"

On the other side of this,

\override Score.Hairpin.after-line-breaking = ##t

clearly belongs in LSR.

I’m quite willing to discuss specific cases if you think that a tweaks needs to be in the main text. But items that can go into LSR are easier to maintain, so I’d like to move as much as possible into there.

It would be “nice” if you spent a lot of time crafting nice tweaks for users… but my recommendation is not to do this. There’s a lot of doc work to do without adding examples of tweaks. Tweak examples can easily be added by normal users by adding them to the LSR.

One place where a documentation writer can profitably spend time writing or upgrading tweaks is creating tweaks to deal with known issues. It would be ideal if every significant known issue had a workaround to avoid the difficulty.

See also

Adding and editing snippets.


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