Conference Schedule / Archive

In this workshop, we will present Lilypond as a viable alternative to commercial notation packages (Sibelius, Finale) for composers and musicologists alike. We will explain Lilypond's editing paradigm, where music is not entered graphically but as plain text, which is then translated to the actual sheet music. While this non-WYSIWYG editing style can initially seem complex and takes time to get used to, it offers many advantages (concerning, for example, the typesetting quality) that we intend to demonstrate in detail. After this workshop, participants should feel confident to get started with Lilypond in order to typeset their next small-to-medium composition or musicological paper. They should regard it as natural to consult the documentation and participate in the Lilypond community to overcome any problems that they might face a part of this process. We will use the cross-platform Lilypond editor 'Frescobaldi' (http://frescobaldi.org) as the main tool in the workshop.
We plan to cover the following subjects:
- Showcase of some examples
- Comparison with commercial notation packages (typesetting quality, license situation)
- Installation on different operating system
- Introduction to HTML help system and realtime support (mailing list, IRC)
- Editing paradigm, basic syntax
- Workflow suggestions for preparing larger scores and individual parts
- Conversion to and from other formats (e.g., .sib and .etf)
- Addressing specific questions by workshop participants ("How do I...?")
- Preparing musicological documents with lilypond-book and LaTeX or the OOoLilyPond plugin for OpenOffice
- Alternative editors ('LilyPondTool' jEdit plugin, Denemo, Rosegarden, Musescore)