1.4 How to read the manuals

This section shows how to read the documentation efficiently, and also introduces some useful interactive features available in the online version.

1.4.1 Omitted material

LilyPond input must be surrounded by { } marks or a ‘\relative { … }’, as we saw in Working on input files. For the rest of this manual, some short examples will omit this. To replicate these examples, you can copy displayed input, but paste it between { and } in your input file.

{
  …example goes here…
}

Also, remember that every LilyPond file should have a \version statement. Because the examples in the manuals are snippets, not files, the \version statement is omitted. But you should make a practice of including them in your files.

1.4.2 Clickable examples

Many people learn programs by trying and fiddling around with the program. This is also possible with LilyPond. If you click on a picture in the HTML version of this manual, you will see the exact LilyPond input that was used to generate that image. Try it on this image:

By cutting and pasting everything in the “ly snippet” section, you have a starting template for experiments. To see exactly the same output (line-width and all), copy everything from “Start cut-&-pastable section” to the bottom of the file.

1.4.3 Overview of manuals

There is a lot of documentation for LilyPond. New users are sometimes confused about what part(s) they should read, and occasionally skip over reading vital portions.

• Before trying to do anything: read the Learning manual’s Tutorial, and Common notation. If you encounter musical terms which you do not recognize, please look them up in the (music-glossary)Top section ‘Glossary’ in Music Glossary.
• Before trying to write a complete piece of music: read the Learning manual’s Fundamental concepts. After that, you may want to look in relevant sections of the (notation)Top section ‘Notation reference’ in Notation Reference.
• Before trying to change the default output: read the Learning manual’s Tweaking output.
• Before undertaking a large project: read the Usage document’s (usage)Suggestions for writing files section ‘Suggestions for writing files’ in Application Usage.

This document was generated by gub on July 13, 2020 using texi2html 1.82.

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