Re: Some problems in the docs, as encountered by a beginner

[Graham Percival]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 05:27:46PM +0000, Neil Sands wrote:
> I hope this is the right place to point out some errors in the LilyPond 
> Learning 
> Manual.

Thanks for the feedback!  Normally this would go to the
bug-lilypond mailing list, which I've CC'd.

> 1. http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/learning/building-a-score-from-
> scratch
> 
> On this page, in the variable called 'ManualTwoMusic', we see the text 'e8~ 
> ees16', which seems to mean an E tied to an E flat. A warning about an 
> unterminated tie is given during the compilation process, and the score that 
> results (and the example score in the docs) both show an E natural followed 
> by 
> an E flat at that point. So I think the tilde symbol ~ for the tie is just 
> wrong 
> here.

Yes, that looks like a typo.

> 2. http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/learning/fixing-overlapping-
> notation
> 
> In a few places on this page, we see this sort of thing:
> '{ e''8 e'' e'' e''  e'' e'' e'' e''  f''2 g'' }'
> when in the example score in the docs, we see a row of Es all in the same 
> octave. When you compile the code given above, it puts each note up two 
> octaves 
> in relation to the last. The examples on this page are full of this kind of 
> thing.

Hmm.  Most examples use \relative c' as stated here:
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/learning/omitted-material
however, some examples use absolute note names.  By default, if
you write

{ c'4 }
then it will be interpreted as written with absolute note names.

I personally wish that we had explicit \absolute{} for such cases,
but it will be tricky to figure out exactly what to do about this.

> 3. http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/learning/style-sheets
> 
> In the code immediately under this text...
> 'Let’s copy the current ‘definitions.ily’ to ‘web-publish.ily’ and modify 
> that. 
> Since this music is aimed at producing a pdf which will be displayed on the 
> screen, we’ll also increase the overall size of the output.'
> ... the first line of code has the comment '%%%  definitions.ily', when 
> actually 
> it should be '%%% web-publish.ily' (as that's the name of the file people 
> following the text have been instructed to edit).

That looks like the correct fix.

> 4. http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/learning/other-sources-of-
> information
> 
> In the GNU/Linux information, the path name 
> INSTALLDIR/lilypond/usr/share/lilypond/current/ is given. In fact, it should 
> begin INSTALLDIR/LilyPond/... (i.e. LilyPond in mixed case).

Hmm, are you sure?  On my system, I see /lilypond/
address@hidden:~
$ ls .usr/lilypond/usr/
bin  etc  lib  share  var

Do you have it installed in /usr/local/ ?  maybe it uses that
capitalization when in /usr/local/ but not when it's in a
different directory?

- Graham