+@comment @c -*-texinfo-*-
@node Preface
-@chapter Preface
+@unnumbered Preface
It must have been during a rehearsal of the EJE (Eindhoven Youth
-Orchestra), somewhere in 1994 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. We soon realised that MPP was fundamentally
-broken by design and it slowly died during 1995. We debated a lot
-about the requirements to an inputformat, but that didn't produce any
-new code. In 1996, Han-Wen started LilyPond. 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 don't have much to learn about it. Therefore, we can't
-really judge whether the manual is clear for a newbie, but maybe you
-can! So, should you find any part of the manual vague or outdated,
-please tell us your suggestions: if you don't, we'll never know.
-
-Han-Wen and Jan
-
-Utrecht/Amsterdam, The Netherlands, March 2001.
-
+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.
+
+
+[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
-appendix?
-[details from lilypond-1.0.0]
-GNU LilyPond's roots lie in MPP, a preprocessor to the rather arcane
-MusiXTeX macro package for TeX. A friend of mine, Jan Nieuwenhuizen
-wrote the first 44 versions (0.01 to 0.44), then his program caught my
-attention, and I was slowly sucked in to the interesting problem of
-easily producing beautifully printed music. I contributed some
-code. We soon realised that MPP's design was too fundamentally broken
-to be repaired, so it was decided to rewrite MPP. We debated a lot about
-the requirements to an inputformat (fall 1995). I sat down and started
-with a parser-first, bottom-up rewrite called mpp95 (which totally
-failed, obviously).
+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!
-After long and hard thinking, I came up with an algorithm for the
-horizontal spacing of multiple staffs (april 1996) I coded it (and did
-not test it). After starting with this fundamental piece, I slowly
-added the stages which come before spacing, and after. A half year
-later, I had a first working version, (october 1996). I announced
-Patchlevel 0.0.7 (or 8) to the mutex list after asking some technical
-details on spacing; it was downloaded approximately 4 times. Then I
-got the hang of it, and in the subsequent two months, I coded until it
-had doubled in size (pl 23).
+Han-Wen and Jan
-Most the other history is described in the NEWS file. The first large
-scale release (0.1) was done after approximately 78 patchlevels on
-August 1, 1997.
+Utrecht/Eindhoven, The Netherlands, July 2002.
-@end ignore
projects / lilypond.git / blobdiff