Getting involved
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Please help us make LilyPond a better program. You can help LilyPond in several ways. Not all tasks requiring programming or understanding the full source code.  You can write to the mailing list (gnu-music-discuss@gnu.org for more information)

Users
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Mutopia needs your help. The mutopia project is a collection of public domain sheet music. You can help the project by entering music (either by hand, or by converting from scans or MIDI) and submitting it. Point your browser to the Mutopia webpage (http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia).

Font designers
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Our set of glyphs (the Feta font) is far from complete.  We need the following glyphs: segno, coda.  The fonts have been coded in MetaFont, so you will need to know MetaFont if you want to contribute a glyph.

Writers
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The documentation of LilyPond and related utilities needs a lot of work. The documentation is written in texinfo (http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo). The documentation of LilyPond is sorely lacking in terms of completeness, depth and organisation.

Write if you know how to write english documentation in texinfo, and know about music and music notation.  You must also know how to use LilyPond (or be prepared to learn using it).  The task is not especially hard, but it is a lot of work, and you must be familiar with LilyPond.

Translators
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LilyPond is completely ready for internationalized messages, but there are only a few translations so far (dutch, italian, german, japanese, french, russian).  Translation involves writing a .po file, which is relatively easy, and does not even require running LilyPond.

Hackers
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There are lots of possibilities of improving the program itself. There are both small projects and big ones. Most of them are listed in our TODO file, listed on the homepage of Jan and Han-Wen (http://www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen/lily-devel).  Modifying LilyPond almost always requires patches to the C++ part.

There are also numerous other interesting projects that are more or less related  to LilyPond

  * Writing convertors, eg. from NIFF and MIDI (we tried writing one with limited success: midi2ly, included with lilypond.)

     We found that writing them in Python is the easiest.

  * Writing a GUI frontend to LilyPond. At the moment denemo.sourceforge.net (denemo) is the most advanced.

  * Helping write solfege tools (http://solfege.sourceforge.net/)

  * Helping primrose (primrose.sourceforge.net), a tool for scanning sheet music.

LilyPond internals
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