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Re: Lilypond-book docs incorrect


From: Mats Bengtsson
Subject: Re: Lilypond-book docs incorrect
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:31:40 +0100
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 (X11/20070716)

For the record, the recommended procedure in version 2.10 and later is
lilypond-book --pdf -o out ...
cd out
pdflatex ...

I don't remember if this works also in 2.8.

   /Mats

Kevin Donnelly wrote:
The only docs I can find on lilypond-book (http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.1/Documentation/user/out-www/lilypond/Integrating-text-and-music.html#Integrating-text-and-music) appear to be misleading without further information. The instructions are as follows:
(1) insert lilypond markup in a .tex file (mybook.tex);
(2) mkdir outputs;
(3) lilypond-book --output=outputs/ mybook.tex;
(4) cd outputs;
(5) latex mybook;
(6) dvips -Ppdf -u +lilypond mybook;
(7) ps2pdf mybook.ps.
(I suppose that in theory all the above steps could be combined into a switch that is passable to lilypond-book saying "make me a pdf out of this tex file, please", but there may be some reason why this has not been done.)

The above process gives a pdf in which the notation is missing noteheads and other things like clefs. In turn, this appears to be linked to the workflow being unable to access the Feta font at some stage(s). Item (3) therefore needs to read:
lilypond-book --psfonts --output=outputs/ mybook.tex
but the same issue must also occur elsewhere, probably at (7).

I have been trying various permutations with various programs and googling for around 10 hours now, and I've given up. Apparently lilypond-book is the "recommended" way of doing this (since the lilypond --tex approach is no longer properly supported), but it plainly doesn't work as advertised. Several of the pages I turned up via Google recount people's problems with getting the Feta font seen by LaTeX, but there seems to be no good (ie easily-applicable) solution to that issue either (the current fonts have no .fd file, for instance, so they would need to be compiled from source, which is not something everyone can do).

What I'm doing now is to generate a pdf from the .ly file produced by Rosegarden (which is a terrific visual front-end for Lilypond) for each of the notation snippets I wanted to reference, take a snapshot of it at 200%, crop and reduce it in GIMP, and then insert it as a picture in KWord. The snippets come out slightly fuzzy, but the process is considerably simpler and less time-consuming than the lilypond-book option, and produces a useable result.

It's very sad that an excellent project like Lilypond, dedicated to producing high-quality notation engraving, doesn't seem to offer a reliable and documented way of working with LaTeX, dedicated to producing high-quality typesetting, even though they are both based on the same TeX engine, and even though it would seem that they are ideal companions. Rosegarden can take its notation view and convert it via Lilypond into a pdf at the click of a button, and it's not clear why converting a tex file into a pdf should be so much harder.

For the record, I am using:
openSUSE 10.2
lilypond 2.8.7-15
te_latex 3.0-58


Kevin Donnelly







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--
=============================================
        Mats Bengtsson
        Signal Processing
        School of Electrical Engineering
        Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)
        SE-100 44  STOCKHOLM
        Sweden
        Phone: (+46) 8 790 8463                         
       Fax:   (+46) 8 790 7260
        Email: address@hidden
        WWW: http://www.s3.kth.se/~mabe
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