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Features of LilyPond

Automated high-quality formatting

• Automatic spacing, line breaking and page breaking.
• Handling of polyphonic collisions for notes, dots, and rests.
• Automatic placement of accidentals, beams, slurs, ties, based on optimal scoring algorithms.
• Users don't need typographical expertise to produce excellent notation.
• No user interaction necessary during running. Running the program can be automated which is convenient for mass converting databases of digitized music and printing algorithmic compositions.
• The Feta font has been tailored especially for LilyPond, and was designed carefully mimicking the finest hand-engraved scores. It is available as a scalable font, but also as a Metafont.

Special notation

• Accidental cautionaries and suggestions, classic and modern styles
• Ambituses
• Arpeggio signs
• Balloon texts (teaching)
• Beamlets
• Blanking arbitrary notation elements (teaching)
• Chord names, in English, French or Italian
• Cluster notation and rhythmic grouping signs
• Coloring of arbitrary notation elements
• Cross staff beaming
• Cue-notes (automatic)
• Dashed or dotted bar lines
• Drum notation
• EasyNotation note heads
• Falls and doits
• Feathered beams
• Figured bass
• Fingerings, including guitar right-hand fingering
• Fret diagrams
• Glissandi
• Grace notes, acciaccatura and appoggiatura
• Hairpin crescendi and decrescendi, also with circled tips (al niente)
• Harmonics
• Laissez vibrer ties
• Ledger lines, including automatic shortening for tight spacing
• Lyric extenders, hyphens, melismata
• Measure repeats (“Percent style”)
• Mensural notation
• Microtones
• Metronome markings
• Nested analysis brackets
• Orchestral scores with automatic part combining
• Ornaments; mordents, pralls and combinations thereof
• Ottava brackets (octaviation)
• Part extraction: see Orchestral scores
• Piano pedals
• Polymetric notation
• Proportional notation
• Quarter tone accidentals
• Quoting of other music fragments, including transposing
• Separator slashes between systems
• Shaped note heads
• Starting and stopping staves anywhere
• Staves, tunable number of staff lines, individual positioning of staff lines
• Stemlets
• String numbering, also on chords
• System separators
• Tablature notation
• Tie formatting for chords
• Transposing
• Tremolos, both for single notes and chords
• Trills, also running and explicit pitches
• Tuplets in arbitrary ratios, nested, broken with customisable endings
• Vertical staff spacing using a skyline algorithm

For details and music samples, follow the chain of NEWS entries and have a look at the regression tests.

Robust design

• No arbitrary limits: unlimited number of staves, voices, measures, lengths of texts, etc.
• Pluggable output backend: output in EPS, PDF, PNG, PostScript, MIDI, SVG.
• Lyrics in any language.
• Text-based input with versatile music language.
• Programmable and extensible with built-in LISP interpreter.

Excellent support

• Works with Unix, including MacOS X and Linux, and Windows (native and Cygwin).
• Active user community.
• Extensive documentation.
• Supported by many other programs RoseGarden, NoteEdit (surpassed by Canorus), Canorus, PowerTab Tools, Denemo, OpenOffice.org plugin.
• Imports ABC, ETF (Finale), MIDI, Music XML, Noteworthy Composer.
• Editors with special LilyPond support Emacs, Vim, JEdit, WordPress.

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