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5.3 Documentation suggestions

Small additions

For small additions to the documentation you might follow these steps.

1. Tell us where the addition should be placed. Please include both the section number and title (for example, ‘LM 2.13 Printing lyrics’).
2. Please write exact changes to the text.
3. A formal patch to the source code is not required; we can take care of the technical details.
4. Send the suggestions to the bug-lilypond@gnu.org mailing list as discussed in Contact.

Here is an example of a perfect documentation report:

To: bug-lilypond@gnu.org
From: helpful-user@example.net
Subject: doc addition

In LM 2.13 (printing lyrics), above the last line ("More options,
like..."), please add:

----
To add lyrics to a divided part, use blah blah blah.  For example,

\score {
  \notes {blah <<blah>> }
  \lyrics {blah <<blah>> }
  blah blah blah
}
----

In addition, the second sentence of the first paragraph is
confusing.  Please delete that sentence (it begins with "Users
often...") and replace it with this:
----
To align lyrics with something, do this thing.
----

Have a nice day,
Helpful User

Larger contributions

To replace large sections of the documentation, the guidelines are stricter. We cannot remove parts of the current documentation unless we are certain that the new version is an improvement.

1. Ask on the lilypond-devel mailing list if such a rewrite is necessary; somebody else might already be working on this issue!
2. Split your work into small portions; this makes it much easier to compare the new and old documentation.
3. Please prepare a formal git patch, ideally submitted as a Merge Request for our repository (see Lifecycle of a merge request).

Contributions that contain examples using overrides

We try to avoid overrides, tweaks, customer Scheme functions, etc., as much as possible in examples shown in the main text of the manuals, as there would be far too many, equally useful, candidates.

The correct way is to submit your example, with appropriate explanatory text and tags, to the LilyPond Snippet Repository (LSR). Snippets that have the “docs” tag can then be easily added as a selected snippet in the documentation. It will also appear automatically in the Snippets lists. See Introduction to LSR.

Snippets that don’t have the “docs” tag will still be searchable and viewable within the LSR, but will be not be included in the Snippets list or be able to be included as part of the main documentation.

Generally, any new snippets that have the “docs” tag are more carefully checked for syntax and formatting.

Announcing your snippet

Once you have followed these guidelines, please send a message to lilypond-devel with your documentation submissions.

We may edit your suggestion for spelling, grammar, or style, and we may not place the material exactly where you suggested, but if you give us some material to work with, we can improve the manual much faster.

Thanks for your interest!