Next: Extending the templates, Up: Putting it all together
Now you're ready to begin writing larger LilyPond files – not just the little examples in the tutorial, but whole pieces. But how should you go about doing it?
The best answer is “however you want to do it.” As long as LilyPond can understand your files and produces the output that you want, it doesn't matter what your files look like. That said, sometimes we make mistakes when writing files. If LilyPond can't understand your files, or produces output that you don't like, how do you fix the problem?
Here are a few suggestions that can help you to avoid or fix problems:
\version
numbers in every file. Note that all
templates contain a \version "2.7.32"
string. We
highly recommend that you always include the \version
, no matter
how small your file is. Speaking from personal experience, it's
quite frustrating to try to remember which version of LilyPond you were
using a few years ago. convert-ly
requires you to declare
which version of LilyPond you used.
{
and }
.
If you are entering music from an existing score (ie typesetting a piece of existing sheet music),
showLastLength
command to speed up processing – see
Skipping corrected music.
mBreak = { \break }
and insert \mBreak
in the input file whenever the manuscript has a line break. This
makes it much easier to compare the LilyPond music to the original
music. When you are finished proofreading your score, you may
define mBreak = { }
to remove all those line breaks. This
will allow LilyPond to place line breaks wherever it feels are
best.
This page is for LilyPond-2.8.0 (stable-branch).