@node Preface
@chapter Preface


It must have been during a rehearsal of the EJE (Eindhoven Youth
Orchestra), somewhere in 1995 that Jan, one of the cranked violists told
Han-Wen, one of the distorted french horn players, about the grand new
project he was working on.  It was an automated system for printing
music (to be precise, it was MPP, a preprocessor for MusiXTeX).  As it
happened, Han-Wen accidentally wanted to print out some parts from a
score, so he started looking at the software, and he quickly got hooked.
It was soon decided that MPP was a dead end. After lots of
philosophizing and heated e-mail exchanges Han-Wen started LilyPond in
1996.  This time, Jan got sucked into Han-Wen's new project.  The rest
is, as they say, history.

[TODO some more here.]

LilyPond would have been a far less useful program without the input
of incountable number of individuals. We would like to thank all users
that sent bugreports, gave suggestions or contributed code.  We would
especially like to thank the following people: Jean-Baptiste Lamy for
providing Tablature support, Mats Bengtsson for the incountable newbie
questions that he answered on the mailing list.  Chris Jackson for
various piano support code, Heikki Junes for taking care of the
Emacs-mode, Glen Prideaux for implementing lyric-phrasing.  Juergen
Reuter for the ancient notation support, Rune Zedeler for many code
improvements All translators that helped translate the error messages.
Jeremie Lumbroso, 

@ignore
  should mention many more people, these are from AUTHORS
@end ignore

We always maintain that wrote this program to satisfy our curiosity,
to have fun together, to help people, but ultimately, LilyPond is a
way to express our deep love for music. May it help you create lots of
beautiful music!

Han-Wen and Jan

Utrecht/Eindhoven, The Netherlands, July 2002.