@node Preface
@chapter Preface
-[talk about:
-why lily, history, about manual, call for feedback on manual and
-program.
-Inspiration from ../misc/ ?
-]
+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+unclear or outdated.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.
+
+
+@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