Re: Documentation?

[Graham Percival]

On 6-Feb-05, at 8:35 AM, Bastiaan Zapf wrote:
> although being a novice to lilypond (but not to programming at all), I  
> tried to typeset some rather stupid Music examples (In fact it was  
> about notes being composited sequentially or in parallel) in LP  
> (version 2.2.6 - because this was default for my installation)

Please upgrade to 2.4.x.  I don't know what installation you have, but  
the 2.4 branch
has many improvements over the 2.2 branch -- especially in the  
documentation.

> First I noted that Lilypond seemed to always extend a line to the  
> whole paper width, no matter how few notes there were on it. While  
> maybe common in the engraver scene, this striked me as bizarre, but i  
> got rid of that with something like:
>
>    \paper { linewidth = 21.\mm }
>
> Of course I did NOT find that command inside the documentation, the  
> only thing which comes close was:

If you used 2.4, you would have easily found
\layout{ raggedright = ##t }
in chapter 7.

> Now my lines were short and pretty. At some point the following  
> thought crossed my mind: "Why dont you just leave out the clef and  
> time indications?" because these were pretty large and taking up about  
> 3/4 of the line (yes i did also want to typeset a single note). While  
> i did recognize that this request might be unusual, I did not in my  
> wildest dreams imagine that it might be THAT unusual.

Again, this is very clearly described in Chapter 7 of the 2.4 manual.

> While Time_signature_engraver is mentioned somewhere  
> (http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.2/Documentation/user/out-www/lilypond- 
> internals/Time_signature_engraver.html#Time_signature_engraver=
> It is not mentioned that it can be "remove"d.

Again, chapter 7 of the current manual.

> I would have greatly appreciated a documentation that would have  
> hinted me at certain features, and especially at the syntax demands of  
> LP, which seem to be a issue for itself. For example, questions that  
> came to my mind were:
>
> 1. what variables are there?
> 2. how can i influence them?
> 2b. what is the exact (the EXACT) syntax of variable names, assignment  
> commands, values (numbers, numbers with units, strings, null values,  
> enumerations,....)
> 3. where are those commands allowed?

Please read the documentation for the devel branch (2.5); specifically
chapters 7 and 8.  Those chapters should answer these questions -- and  
if they
don't, please let us know where the docs are inadequate, and we'll work
on improving those.

> 5. there are various scheme snippets in the documentation. Where would  
> I be allowed to talk scheme, and where not? Can i just abandon all the  
> wacky .ly file syntax and write scheme?

Chapter 8 and appendix B, I believe.

> Anyways, at least i worked it out now. And, Lilypond prints beautiful  
> score. Good job done on that part!

I'm glad it worked for you!

The LilyPond project only recently got a dedicated Documentation Editor  
(me).  All my
changes were made to versions 2.3 and above, so by using the old 2.2  
branch, you missed
many doc improvements.  The docs for the next stable branch should be  
much better
than 2.2.

- Graham Percival, LilyPond Documentation Editor.