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LilyPond — Notation Reference

This manual provides a reference for all notation that can be produced with LilyPond version 2.25.28. It assumes that the reader is familiar with the material in the Learning Manual. 

Musical notation
1 Pitches  Writing and display the pitches of notes.
2 Rhythms  Writing and displaying the durations of notes.
3 Expressive marks  Adding expression to notes.
4 Repeats  Repeat music.
5 Simultaneous notes  More than one note at once.
6 Staff notation  Displaying staves.
7 Editorial annotations  Special notation to increase legibility.
8 Text  Adding text to scores. 

Specialist notation
9 Vocal music  Lyrics, operas, and more.
10 Keyboard and other multi-staff instruments   Piano, harp, etc.
11 Unfretted string instruments   Violin and friends.
12 Fretted string instruments   Guitar, Lute, etc.
13 Percussion  Drums and friends.
14 Wind instruments  Woodwinds, brass, and more.
15 Chord notation  Chords and figured bass.
16 Contemporary music  Also graphical notation.
17 Ancient notation  Mensural music, Gregorian and Kievan chant, etc.
18 World music  Non-Western music 

General input and output
19 Input modes  Note mode, Lyrics mode, Markup mode, etc.
20 Input structure  How a LilyPond input file looks like.
21 Titles and headers  Also footnotes, table of contents, etc.
22 Working with input files   Including files, tagging music, and more.
23 Controlling output  Music extraction and skipping, output formats, embedding files in PDF, etc.
24 Creating MIDI output  Notation support, dynamics, instruments, channels, and more.
25 Extracting musical information   Displaying LilyPond data structures. 

Spacing issues
26 Page layout  Paper size, fixed and vertical spacing, \paper variables.
27 Score layout  Staff size, the \layout block.
28 Breaks  Line and page breaking.
29 Vertical spacing  Spacing and positioning of vertical staves and systems.
30 Horizontal spacing  Spacing sections, strict note spacing, and more.
31 Fitting music onto fewer pages   Displaying and changing vertical spacing. 

Changing defaults
32 Tuning output  A first overview.
33 Interpretation contexts   Creating and referencing contexts, and more.
34 Explaining the Internals Reference   How to find descriptions for grobs, properties, engravers, and more.
35 Modifying properties  \set, \override, \tweak, etc.
36 Useful concepts and properties   How grobs and their properties are classified. 

Appendices
Appendix A Markup commands  Detailed description of all markup commands.
Appendix B Notation manual tables   Tables and charts.
Appendix C Cheat sheet  Summary of LilyPond syntax.
Appendix D GNU Free Documentation License   License of this document.
Appendix E Index  

For more information about how this manual fits with the other documentation, or to read this manual in other formats, see Manuals.

If you are missing any manuals, the complete documentation can be found at https://lilypond.org/.

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LilyPond Notation Reference v2.25.28 (development-branch).