+@c -*- coding: utf-8; mode: texinfo; -*-
+@c This file is part of lilypond.tely
+@ignore
+ Translation of GIT committish: FILL-IN-HEAD-COMMITTISH
-@node Preface
-@chapter Preface
+ When revising a translation, copy the HEAD committish of the
+ version that you are working on. See TRANSLATION for details.
+@end ignore
+@c \version "2.12.0"
-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.
+@node Preface
+@unnumbered Preface
-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!
-So should you find any part of the manual vague, unclear or outdated,
-please let us know.
+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 decided that MPP was a dead end. After
+lots of philosophizing and heated email exchanges, Han-Wen started
+LilyPond in 1996. This time, Jan got sucked into Han-Wen's new
+project.
+
+In some ways, developing a computer program is like learning to play
+an instrument. In the beginning, discovering how it works is fun, and
+the things you cannot do are challenging. After the initial excitement,
+you have to practice and practice. Scales and studies can be dull, and
+if you are not motivated by others -- teachers, conductors or
+audience -- it is very tempting to give up. You continue, and gradually
+playing becomes a part of your life. Some days it comes naturally, and
+it is wonderful, and on some days it just does not work, but you keep
+playing, day after day.
+
+Like making music, working on LilyPond can be dull work, and on
+some days it feels like plodding through a morass of bugs.
+Nevertheless, it has become a part of our life, and we keep doing it.
+Probably the most important motivation is that our program actually
+does something useful for people. When we browse around the net we
+find many people who use LilyPond, and produce impressive pieces of
+sheet music. Seeing that feels unreal, but in a very pleasant way.
+
+Our users not only give us good vibes by using our program, many of
+them also help us by giving suggestions and sending bug reports, so we
+would like to thank all users that sent us bug reports, gave
+suggestions or contributed in any other way to LilyPond.
+
+Playing and printing music is more than a nice analogy. Programming
+together is a lot of fun, and helping people is deeply satisfying, but
+ultimately, working on 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/Amsterdam, The Netherlands, March 2001.
+Utrecht/Eindhoven, The Netherlands, July 2002.
-
-@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).
-
-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).
-
-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.
-
-
-@end ignore
projects / lilypond.git / blobdiff