@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.

You're reading the preface of the manual for LilyPond 1.4, which is in
all honesty, the first release of LilyPond that combines stability,
flexibility and good documentation.  We hope you will have as much fun
in using LilyPond as we have when hacking it.

This manual was written to help you learn LilyPond, but as you might
imagine, we ourselves don't have much to learn about it.  We can't
really judge whether the manual is helpful for users, but maybe you can!
Don't hesitate to tell us if you find any part of the manual vague,
unclear or outdated.

Han-Wen and Jan

Utrecht/Amsterdam, The Netherlands, March 2001.