14.1 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 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 will extract the music fragments, format them, and put 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.

     
     \documentclass[a4paper]{article}
     
     \begin{document}
     
     Documents for @command{lilypond-book} may freely mix music and text.
     For example,
     
     \begin{lilypond}
     \relative c' {
       c2 g'2 \times 2/3 { f8 e d } c'2 g4
     }
     \end{lilypond}
     
     Options are put in brackets.
     
     \begin[fragment,quote,staffsize=26,verbatim]{lilypond}
       c'4 f16
     \end{lilypond}
     
     Larger examples can be put into a separate file, and introduced with
     \verb+\lilypondfile+.
     
     \lilypondfile[quote,noindent]{screech-boink.ly}
     
     \end{document}

Under Unix, you can view the results as follows

cd input/tutorial
mkdir -p out/
lilypond-book --output=out --psfonts lilybook.tex
lilypond-book (GNU LilyPond) 2.6.0
Reading lilybook.tex...
..lots of stuff deleted..
Compiling out/lilybook.tex...
cd out
latex lilybook
lots of stuff deleted
xdvi lilybook

To convert the file into a PDF document, run the following commands

dvips -o -Ppdf -h lilybook.psfonts lilybook
ps2pdf lilybook.ps

If you are running latex in twocolumn mode, remember to add -t landscape to the dvips options.

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. It will create the files in a separate subdirectory dir.

Running dvips will produce many warnings about fonts. They are not harmful; please ignore them.

Finally the result of the LaTeX example shown above.¹ This finishes the tutorial section.

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

Options are put in brackets.

     
     c'4 f16

Larger examples can be put into a separate file, and introduced with \lilypondfile.