@node Preface
@chapter Preface

Some six years ago I was in the EJE (Eindhoven Youth Orchestra), and
Jan, one of the cranked violists told me 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). Accidentally, I also
wanted to print out some parts from a score, so I started looking at his
software, and quickly got hooked.  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. I hope you have as much fun in using
LilyPond as I had when hacking it.

This manual was written to help you learn lily, but as you might
imagine, I don't have anything learn about it. It's hard for me as a
writer to judge whether the manual is clear for a newbie, but you can!
So, should you find any part of the manual vague or outdated, please let
us know: if you don't tell us, we'll never know.


Han-Wen Nienhuys

Utrecht, The Netherlands,  March 2001.



[preface jcn here? ]