10 This is the toplevel README to LilyPond
13 LilyPond is the GNU Project music typesetter. This program
14 can print beautiful sheet music from a music definition
15 file. It can also play mechanical performances to a MIDI
16 file. Features include multiple staffs, meters, clefs,
17 keys, lyrics, versatile input language, cadenzas, beams,
18 slurs, triplets, named chords, transposing, formatting
19 scores, part extraction. It includes a nice font of musical
26 LilyPond uses a versioning scheme similar to the Linux ker-
27 nel. In a version "x.y.z", an even second number 'y'
28 denotes a stable version. For development versions 'y' is
29 odd. For using straightforward score production, please use
30 the latest stable version. Development versions may not
31 produce good or nice scores.
33 If you have downloaded a
37 version, then this is version is *not* meant for producing
38 nice output (but to keep your patchsets up to date). It
39 might not even compile. The same goes for a version with a
40 4th version number, eg
44 It will be safer if you download 1.2.3 or wait for 1.2.4.
50 For the compilation and running of LilyPond you need some
51 additional packages. Please refer to the installation
54 NOTE: If you downloaded a binary (.rpm or a W95/NT .zip
55 file), then you don't have to compile LilyPond.
61 For your convenience, a formatted copy of the INSTALL
62 instructions are in the toplevel directory, as INSTALL.txt
64 The process is fairly straightforward, but chances are that
65 you have to specify directories for to configure: this is
66 done with the options --enable-tex-dir and --enable-mf-dir
72 The real documentation is the directory Documentation/
74 To generate the pretty-printed docs, you have to run config-
75 ure first, and then do this:
79 You can also simply read the .yo sources. They are ASCII
80 text. The complete documentation is accessible in formatted
81 form at the website http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/hanwen/lily-
88 LilyPond is a long way from finished and polished. We do
89 appreciate criticism, comments, bugreports, patches, etc.
91 Please send your e-mail to one of the MAILING LISTS
93 and not to us personally. See Documentation/links.yo for
100 If you have received this file as part of a DOS/Window32
101 distribution (lilypond-*.zip), then it is advisable to also
102 download the source package, since it might contain more
103 documentation ftp://ftp.cs.uu.nl/pub/GNU/LilyPond/
105 If you decide to build LilyPond from source, please read the
106 INSTALL.txt document first, especially the Windows NT/95
113 * Please read the file BUGS for some ugly bugs. This espe-
114 cially applies Linux-Intel unix users.
116 * If you have installed a previous version, be sure to
117 remove old font files, eg
122 rm `find /var/lib/texmf/fonts -name 'feta*'`
127 a script to do this for you is in buildscripts/clean-
131 8: CDROM DISTRIBUTIONS
134 If you have received LilyPond on a cdrom, chances are that
135 development has moved a some patchlevels up. If possible,
136 please check the latest version of LilyPond before reporting