Introductory questions

Where are the graphical canvas, menus, and toolbars?

LilyPond requires you to write music as text. Please read about our Text input.

There’s a lot of documentation! Do I need to read it?

You need to read the Learning manual. As for the rest of documentation, you only need to read the sections which discuss the notation that you wish to create.

That’s still a lot of reading! Is it worth it?

Please decide for yourself; the reasons why you might want to use LilyPond are given in the Introduction.