14.6 Music fragment options

In the following, a “LilyPond command” refers to any command described in the previous sections which is handled by lilypond-book to produce a music snippet. For simplicity, LilyPond commands are only shown in LaTeX syntax.

Note that the option string is parsed from left to right; if an option occurs multiple times, the last one is taken.

The following options are available for LilyPond commands:

staffsize=ht

Set staff size to ht, which is measured in points.

ragged-right

Produce ragged-right lines with natural spacing (i.e., ragged-right = ##t is added to the LilyPond snippet). This is the default for the \lilypond{} command if no line-width option is present. It is also the default for the lilypond environment if the fragment option is set, and no line width is explicitly specified.

packed

Produce lines with packed spacing (i.e., packed = ##t is added to the LilyPond snippet).

line-width

line-width=size\unit

Set line width to size, using unit as units. unit is one of the following strings: cm, mm, in, or pt. This option affects LilyPond output (this is, the staff length of the music snippet), not the text layout.

If used without an argument, set line width to a default value (as computed with a heuristic algorithm).

If no line-width option is given, lilypond-book tries to guess a default for lilypond environments which don't use the ragged-right option.

notime

Do not print the time signature, and turns off the timing (key signature, bar lines) in the score.

fragment

Make lilypond-book add some boilerplate code so that you can simply enter, say,

     c'4

without \layout, \score, etc.

nofragment

Don't add additional code to complete LilyPond code in music snippets. Since this is the default, nofragment is redundant normally.

indent=size\unit

Set indentation of the first music system to size, using unit as units. unit is one of the following strings: cm, mm, in, or pt. This option affects LilyPond, not the text layout.

noindent

Set indentation of the first music system to zero. This option affects LilyPond, not the text layout. Since no indentation is the default, noindent is redundant normally.

quote

Reduce line length of a music snippet by 2*0.4in and put the output into a quotation block. The value ‘0.4in’ can be controlled with the exampleindent option.

exampleindent

Set the amount by which the quote option indents a music snippet.

relative

relative=n

Use relative octave mode. By default, notes are specified relative to middle C. The optional integer argument specifies the octave of the starting note, where the default 1 is middle C.

LilyPond also uses lilypond-book to produce its own documentation. To do that, some more obscure music fragment options are available.

verbatim

The argument of a LilyPond command is copied to the output file and enclosed in a verbatim block, followed by any text given with the intertext option (not implemented yet); then the actual music is displayed. This option does not work well with \lilypond{} if it is part of a paragraph.

texidoc

(Only for Texinfo output.) If lilypond is called with the --header=texidoc option, and the file to be processed is called foo.ly, it creates a file foo.texidoc if there is a texidoc field in the \header. The texidoc option makes lilypond-book include such files, adding its contents as a documentation block right before the music snippet.

Assuming the file foo.ly contains

     \header {
       texidoc = "This file demonstrates a single note."
     }
     { c'4 }

and we have this in our Texinfo document test.texinfo

     @lilypondfile[texidoc]{foo.ly}

the following command line gives the expected result

     lilypond-book --process="lilypond --format=tex --tex \
                   --header=texidoc test.texinfo

Most LilyPond test documents (in the input directory of the distribution) are small .ly files which look exactly like this.

printfilename

If a LilyPond input file is included with \lilypondfile, print the file name right before the music snippet. For HTML output, this is a link.

fontload

This option includes fonts in all of the generated EPS-files for this snippet. This should be used if the snippet uses any font that LaTeX cannot find on its own.