@comment @c -*-texinfo-*-

@node Preface
@unnumbered 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.

A stable release, like version 1.6 is a good moment to contemplate the
past and the present.  Looking back we notice something curious: when
we started, we mistook our naivite for self confidence, and our
interested was piqued by music typography. LilyPond was our pet
project. Somewhere along the line, it grew out of our hands. Today, we
can't tell whether we are doing LilyPond, or LilyPond is doing
us. Working on it has become more than a simple hobby. We're not sure
how this happened, but we think 

  overestimated our  slef the combination of  high energy strong 



  one thing that
stands out. Somewhere 


[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.