6.1 Introduction to website work

The website is not written directly in HTML; instead it is autogenerated along with the documentation using Texinfo source files. Texinfo is the standard for documentation of GNU software and allows generating output in HTML, PDF, and Info formats, which drastically reduces maintenance effort and ensures that the website content is consistent with the rest of the documentation. This makes the environment for improving the website rather different from common web development.

If you have not contributed to LilyPond before, a good starting point might be incremental changes to the CSS file, to be found at https://lilypond.org/css/lilypond-website.css or in the LilyPond source code at ./Documentation/css/lilypond-website.css.

Large scale structural changes tend to require familiarity with the project in general, a track record in working on LilyPond documentation as well as a prospect of long-term commitment.

The Texinfo source file for generating HTML are to be found in

Documentation/en/web.texi
Documentation/en/web/*.texi

Unless otherwise specified, follow the instructions and policies given in Documentation work. That chapter also contains a quick introduction to Texinfo; consulting an external Texinfo manual should be not necessary.

Exceptions to the documentation policies

• Sectioning: the website only uses chapters and sections; no subsections or subsubsections.
• @ref{}s to other manuals (@rnotation, @rlearning, etc): you can’t link to any pieces of automatically generated documentation, like the IR or certain NR appendices.
• The bibliography in Community->Publications is generated automatically from .bib files; formatting is done automatically by texi-web.bst.
• …
• For anything not listed here, just follow the same style as the existing website texinfo files.