LilyPond

< Graphics | Using Graphics > ((Please leave this page orphaned until LilyPond integration is ready!))

LilyPond is a great music engraver, and this page is for future LilyPond integration in ConTeXt. At the moment you can use LilyPond's PDFs as graphics just fine.

Setup

• First you need a working LilyPond installation plus dependencies like GhostScript.
• see \setupLilyPond

Snippets

There are some notes \LilyPond{ \relative{bes a c b} } embedded in this line.

Sections

E.g. for a songbook you want to place big chunks of LilyPond output (i.e. note staffs) in your text. It behaves like any other graphics, especially similar to embedded MetaPost code:

\section{A Tune}

\startLilyPond
\relative {
	\repeat volta 2 {
		\partial 4 e4 |
		a2 c4 d |
		e2 f4 e |
		d2. c4 |
		b4. c8 d4 e |
		a,2 c4 d |
		e2 f4 e |
		g,2 a |
		\partial 2. b2. |
	}
	\repeat volta 2 {
		\partial 4 r4 |
		f' g f d |
		e f e c |
		a b c d |
		e2. e4 |
		f g f8 e d4 |
		e f e c |
		a c b8 a g4 |
	}
	\alternative {
		{ \partial 2. g2. }
		{ \partial 2. a2. }
	}
}
\stopLilyPond

There's nothing to say about this tune yet; my friend heard it from Lúnasa.

Developer's Corner

I need to figure out how LilyPond's LaTeX integration in lilypond-book works. It is a different approach: LilyPond preprocesses the LaTeX code, replaces LilyPond code with images and runs LaTeX. Instead with ConTeXt, texexec would do this preprocessing step, avoiding the need to run different programs yourself. I guess I can copy the needed setup (LilyPond stub file) from lilypond-book (a messy Python script).

I don't yet know how to prepare \setupLilyPond. It should be able to:

• set the text font (default should be ConTeXt's bodyfont instead of LilyPond's)
• set line width
• set staff and text size
• access most other layout parameters

LilyPond uses fontconfig for font search. At least on MacOS X it's very restricted what kind of fonts it can use - only single-style TrueType (including dfont). I didn't manage yet to use fonts from the TeX tree. (That doesn't seem to be fontconfig's fault - it writes appropriate font cache files everywhere.)

To remember:

• see LilyPond Docs!
• How do we handle version/syntax changes of LilyPond?
•  !! How do we get clean PDFs (EPS for DVI mode), without anything around the staffs? Is lilypond-book's setup enough?

--Hraban 2005-08-20

Workarounds

Calling lilypond from command line in Windows fails. (Seems like a bug in lilypond.) You have to modify the module, so that lilypond is called with the whole path (C:/prog/lilypond/usr/bin/lilypond for example instead of lilypond alone).