4.2.1 Requirements for running LilyPond

This section contains the list of software packages that are required to run LilyPond (this is, to successfully execute the lilypond binary and its subprograms to output a PDF, and to execute other programs like lilypond-book that are installed, too).

Additional software packages are necessary to compile LilyPond from its sources; this gets handled in a later section.

• Cairo
  Use version 1.16 or newer.
• FontConfig
  Use version 2.13 or newer.
• FreeType
  Use version 2.10 or newer.
• Ghostscript
  Use version 9.03 or newer.
• GLib (also required for Pango)
  Use version 2.64 or newer. Please note that LilyPond requires GRegex support in GLib. In turn, this implies that PCRE, the library GLib utilizes for regular expressions, must be built with Unicode support. In PCRE1, the flags --enable-utf --enable-unicode-properties must have been passed to the configure script when compiling PCRE; this is the case in most GNU/Linux distributions. In PCRE2, Unicode support is enabled by default.
• Guile
  Use version 3.0.7 or later point releases.
• libpng
  Use version 1.6 or newer.
• Pango
  Use version 1.44.5 or newer.
• Python
  Use version 3.10 or newer.
• Text fonts
  By default, LilyPond uses the families C059, Nimbus Mono PS, and Nimbus Sans of the URW++ package.

  Some distributions do not provide these fonts’ OTF files. If they are missing, download and manually extract the OTF files to your local ~/.fonts/ directory.

  Some languages, such as Vietnamese, do not have glyphs in the URW++ fonts. When a glyph is not found in those fonts, LilyPond attempts to fall back to the families Cursor, Heros, and Schola of the TeX Gyre package. Note for downstream packagers: while packaging the URW++ fonts is important in order to make (most) LilyPond files render the same across environments, packaging the TeX Gyre fonts is optional; you can make them an optional dependency, for example.

  For more details on text fonts, please see Fonts.