3.1 An example of a musicological document

Some texts contain music examples. These texts are musicological treatises, songbooks, or manuals like this. Such texts can be made by hand, simply by importing a PostScript or PDF figure into the word processor. However, there is an automated procedure to reduce the amount of work involved in HTML, LaTeX, Texinfo, and DocBook documents.

A script called lilypond-book extracts the music fragments, formats them, and puts back the resulting notation. Here we show a small example for use with LaTeX. The example also contains explanatory text, so we will not comment on it further.

Input

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}

\begin{document}

Documents for \verb+lilypond-book+ may freely mix music and text.
For example,

\begin{lilypond}
\relative {
  c'2 e2 \tuplet 3/2 { f8 a b } a2 e4
}
\end{lilypond}

Options to control the appearance of the snippets can be added,
too.  For example,

\begin{lilypond}[fragment,quote,staffsize=26,verbatim]
  c'4 f16
\end{lilypond}

Larger music snippets can be put into separate files.  For
example,

\lilypondfile[quote,noindent]{screech-and-boink.ly}

(If needed, replace \verb+screech-and-boink.ly+ by any \verb+.ly+ file
you put in the same directory as this file.)

\end{document}

Processing

Save the code above to a file called lilybook.lytex, then in a terminal run

> lilypond-book --output=out --pdf lilybook.lytex
lilypond-book (GNU LilyPond) 2.25.23
Reading 'lilybook.lytex'...
…lots of stuff deleted…
Writing 'out/lilybook.tex'...
> cd out
> pdflatex lilybook
This is pdfTeX, ...
(./lilybook.tex
…lots of stuff deleted…
Output written on lilypond.pdf, ...
> xpdf lilybook
(replace xpdf by your favorite PDF viewer)

Running lilypond-book and latex creates a lot of temporary files, which would clutter up the working directory. To remedy this, use the --output=dir option to create the files in a separate subdirectory dir.

Because this tutorial is written in Texinfo we cannot directly show the LaTeX output of the example. In the next section, however, you can see an approximation (structure-wise) of the result.

This finishes the tutorial section.

Output

Documents for lilypond-book may freely mix music and text. Using Texinfo syntax, this example

@lilypond
\relative {
  c'2 e2 \tuplet 3/2 { f8 a b } a2 e4
}
@end lilypond

produces

Options to control the appearance of snippets can be added, too. Using LaTeX syntax, this example

\begin{lilypond}[fragment, quote, staffsize=26]
c'4 f16
\end{lilypond}

produces

Larger music snippets can be put into separate files. Using HTML syntax, this example

<lilypondfile quote noindent>
  snippets/screech-and-boink.ly
</lilypondfile>

produces

If a tagline is required, either default or custom, the entire snippet must be enclosed in a \book { } construct.

\book {
  \header { title = "A scale in LilyPond" }

  \relative { c' d e f g a b c }
}