4.1.1 General suggestions

Here are a few suggestions that can help you to avoid or fix problems:

• Include \version numbers in every file. Note that all templates contain a \version "2.10.10" string. We highly recommend that you always include the \version, no matter how small your file is. Speaking from personal experience, it's quite frustrating to try to remember which version of LilyPond you were using a few years ago. convert-ly requires you to declare which version of LilyPond you used.
• Include checks: Bar check, Octave check and Barnumber check. If you include checks every so often, then if you make a mistake, you can pinpoint it quicker. How often is “every so often”? It depends on the complexity of the music. For very simple music, perhaps just once or twice. For very complex music, perhaps every bar.
• One bar per line of text. If there is anything complicated, either in the music itself or in the output you desire, it's often good to write only one bar per line. Saving screen space by cramming eight bars per line just isn't worth it if you have to ‘debug’ your files.
• Comment your files. Use either bar numbers (every so often) or references to musical themes (“second theme in violins,” “fourth variation”, etc). You may not need comments when you're writing the piece for the first time, but if you want to go back to change something two or three years later, or if you pass the source over to a friend, it will be much more challenging to determine your intentions or how your file is structured if you didn't comment the file.
• Indent your braces. A lot of problems are caused by an imbalance in the number of { and }.
• Explicity add durations at the beginnings of sections and identifiers. If you specify c4 d e at the beginning of a phrase (instead of just c d e) you can save yourself some problems if you rearrange your music later.
• Separate tweaks from music definitions. See Saving typing with identifiers and functions and Style sheets.

Other languages: French.