I've realised that there's a silly problem here, which isn't Lilypond's fault. One really needs two different defaults for opening a .ly file: one to edit it (Lilypad, Frescobaldi etc.) and one to engrave it (Lilypond). And Microsoft, curse them, in Windows 7 and later removed the possibility for users to add menu items to the right-click on an icon. I'm told that you can still do it with a registry fix (dangerous), but that's not much consolation.
Maybe the documentation could do with a bit of tweaking here?
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Sunday, April 14, 2013, 1:38:44 PM, you wrote:
2013/4/14 Peter Toye <address@hidden>
Just starting to try out Lilypond, and finding a few problems in getting to work at all.
The OS is Windows 7, if that makes any difference.
which version of lilypond?
1) Double-clicking on a .ly file gets into Wordpad, and doesn't compile the file. To compile it I have to drag-and-drop the file onto the Lilypond icon on the desktop. This doesn't seem to conform to the documentation.
I think that you have to associate the .ly extension with Lilypad.
BTW, I recommend using Frescobaldi instead of Lilypad: http://frescobaldi.org/download
2) Once it's compiled there's no output, just a log file without errors (see below).
# -*-compilation-*-
Processing `D:/Peter/Music/Lilypond/Warlock1.ly'
Parsing...
Interpreting music...[8]
Preprocessing graphical objects...
Finding the ideal number of pages...
Fitting music on 1 page...
Drawing systems...
can you see a pdf file here?
D:/Peter/Music/Lilypond/Warlock1.pdf