Re: making the actual music

[Peter Wright]

On 18/12 03:35:48, henry wrote:
> i just downloaded this today, and tried fiddling with a few
> notes...i just can't figure out how to make the actual sheet music
> document.

Start with a Lilypond text file, eg. "bling.ly", then run (from a
command line) "lilypond bling.ly" - it should create (among other
things) a file "bling.pdf". View that in Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Get the above working first, then everything should be clear. :-)

There are lots of different .ly files you can try "lilyponding" on
http://mutopiaproject.org/ , and there should also be a few examples
in the Lilypond distribution you've installed.

Or you can grab a copy of this, which I put together while teaching
myself Lilypond a few months ago:

http://flooble.net/~pete/deep-river.ly

> also, how do you get the view seen in the sample, the on
> one with the three windows (one with the code, one with the sheet
> music and one with some other stuff..=/ ) its on the top of the
> "crash course" page.

This one? http://lilypond.org/web/switch/howto

> is it a certain software? if it is, could someone tell me how/where
> to get it, and what the heck to do with it? lol

There's three separate GUI programs in that screenshot - one is a
terminal, one is Emacs (a text editor, being used to edit the file
les-nereides.ly), and the third is gv (a program that can view the
Postscript output from Lilypond).

(I normally convert the postscript straight into PDF and use a PDF
viewer (like, eg. Adobe Acrobat Reader) to look at it, not bothering
with the Postscript output)

Depending on how good your eyesight is :), you can see from the
terminal that the user has run

  lilypond input/les-nereides.ly

...which generates some text messages, along with the postscript file
les-nereides.ps, then the user runs:

  gv les-nereides.ps

...to run the "gv" program to view the generated postscript file.

You can also see just before running the "gv" program, there's a line:

  Converting to `les-nereides.pdf'...

...which is what modern Lilyponds do by default. So the user could
also have run Acrobat Reader (or another PDF viewer) to view the PDF.


Hope that helps a bit,

Pete.
-- 
The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day
that they start making vacuum cleaners.