Running accessory programs (convert-ly, etc.)

[Albert Bickford]

> I'm not top posting

I'm not sure if this is a documentation problem or a bug in the Windows 
implementation of Lilypond 2.10.33.  It concerns the way one invokes accessory 
programs like convert-ly and midi2ly, as documented in sections 13.3 and all of 
chapter 15.

For example, section 13.3 states that to invoke convert-ly, the command line 
should be:

> convert-ly -e myfile.ly

However, convert-ly is a python program, not an .exe, so what I had to do was

> python convert-ly.py -e myfile.ly

That is, mention the python executible explicitly and add the .py extension to 
convert-ly.  Further, I had to run this command in C:\Program 
Files\LilyPond\usr\bin, where python and the .py programs are stored.  (I tried 
adding this folder to the path, but I don't know enough about Python to enable 
it to find all its support modules.)

The same is true for the programs described in chapter 15.

So, either this is an installation problem on Windows XP Professional SP2, in 
which the path, environment variables, etc. are not set up properly to work in 
the way described in the manual, or the manual needs to be changed.  

The manual does include a disclaimer about not trying to tell people how to run 
programs from the command line.  However, because of the involvement of Python, 
this is more than just running programs from the command line, and is more than 
most users should be expected to figure out.