3 MANIFESTO -- Rationale behind the GNU LilyPond project
8 GNU LilyPond was written with some considerations in mind:
15 Describing a well-defined language for defining music. We call
16 this language (rather arrogantly) The Musical Definition Language
17 (mudela for short). GNU LilyPond reads a mudela sourcefile and outputs a
22 We want to provide an easy-to-use interface for typesetting music in
23 its broadest sense. This interface should be intuitive from a musical
24 point of view. By broadest sense we mean: it is designed for music
25 printed left to right in staffs, using notes to designate rythm and
30 Generate high-quality output. Ideally it should be of a professional
31 quality. We'd like to render Herbert Chlapiks words, "Fine music
32 setting is not possible without a knowledgeable printer," untrue.
36 Make a which system which fully tweakable. It should be possible to
37 typeset a book on how not to typeset music.
44 Further considerations while doing the programming
50 GNU LilyPond uses MusiXTeX fonts and TeX for its output. This is not a key
51 issue: in a future version, GNU LilyPond might bypass TeX, but at the moment
52 TeX is very convenient for producing output.
57 GNU LilyPond does not display notes directly, nor will it be rehacked to be
58 used interactively. GNU LilyPond writes output to a file. It will not be
59 extended to play music, or to recognize music.
63 GNU LilyPond is intended to run on Unix platforms, but it should
64 be portable to any platform which can run TeX and the GNU tools
68 GNU LilyPond is free. Commercial windows packages for setting music are
69 abundant. Free musicprinting software is scarce.
73 GNU LilyPond is written in GNU C++. It will not be downgraded/ported to fit
80 The design of Mudela has been (perfect past tense, hopefully) an
81 ongoing process, the most important criteria being:
87 define the (musical) message of the composer as unambiguously as possible,
91 be intuitive, and easily readable
92 (compared to, say, Musi*TeX input, or MIDI :-),
96 be writable in ASCII with a simple texteditor, yfte(TM).
100 Other considerations were (and will be):
106 be able to edit the layout without danger of changing the original
111 allow for adding different interpretations, again,
112 without danger of changing the original,
116 easy to create a conductor's score,
117 as well as the scores for all individual instruments,
121 provide simple musical manipulations, such as
122 S<(i) extracting> a slice of music from a previously defined piece,
123 S<(ii) extracting> only the rhythm from a piece of music,
124 S<(iii) transposing>, etc.,
128 easy to comprehend to both programmers and others.
132 One of the things that (might) be here would be: feasible to use in a
133 graphic editor. We don't have experience with these beasts, so we
134 don't know how to do this. Comments appreciated.
136 Musical pieces could be
142 Mahlerian orchestral scores,
146 piano pieces (Schubertian, Rachmaninovian),
150 pop songs (lyrics and chords),
158 Bach multivoice organ pieces,
162 short excerpts to be used in musicological publications.