Re: Understanding Lilypond

[Flaming Hakama by Elaine]

From: Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: Understanding Lilypond

Hi Peter,

> many of us have struggled for many months to get to grips with the structure and philosophy of Lilypond.

1. Regarding the structure, what are you struggling with exactly?

2. Regarding the philosophy, what are you struggling with exactly?

Hope I can help!
Kieren.

I have perhaps too much to say about lilypond documentation, much of it still very unformed in my mind.

Here is some coherent but still probably pie-in-the-sky stuff that I think would be exceptionally helpful.

% Code examples

The current examples present the minimum information necessary to demonstrate the feature.

This follows lilypond's approach, which is to invent everything needed that you didn't specify, like books, scores, staves, time signatues, clefs, barlines, etc.

However, there are lots of time you are dealing with things that need to be applied for only one staff, one staff group, for only one measure, only one book, etc.   Before you can apply the example, you have to backfill the structure to which it needs to be applied.  Then, apply your modification in the correct place.

This leads me to a few suggestions:

1a) Provide a way to take a snippet and get the inferred document.    Which is to say, let lilypond invent all the book/score/staff, etc. necessary, and then output that structure, rather than the usual pdf output.   (Someone will probably inform me that Frescobaldi already does this, and/or there is an interpreter that does it, or a command line argument...)

1b) Add an option to toggle each example from the current, "minimal" example, to a "full context" example that has this inferred structure.  

2) For things that can be applied in various places (at global level, book level, score level, staff group level, staff level, layout, context etc.)  provide examples for what each of these look like.  Let the user choose at which level the example should pertain, so they can then copy/paste the code applicable to their situation.

3a) Link from the examples in the documentation to templates (and provide enough templates to cover the material.)

3b) Compile some documentation-demonstration scores made by stringing together the content in the existing examples, then provide links to the examples' usage in these reference scores.

3c) Develop a library of musical example scores and cross reference them so you can go from score to documentation or vice versa.

I am willing to help with documentation efforts if anyone is coordinating them and needs help.

  

David Elaine Alt

415 . 341 .4954                                           "Confusion is highly underrated"

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