Re: Downloading manual

[Mats Bengtsson]

> Sorry, I am new to Lilypond and I am afraid I am all questions.

If you have a question, there are almost always at least ten 
other people who have same question, or will have them in 
the future. Don't feel ashamed for asking. You will help also
the others, both since the answer will be in the mailing list
archives and since it hopefully is possible to improve Lilypond
to avoid the question in the future.

> I am trying to download the manual, but when doing so and trying to open with 
> gzip -d it says it is not the correct type. I am using Windows 2k and I have 
> tried to change the extension but it does not work.

It's a problem with these gzipped Postscript files. In fact, 
GSview is certainly able to read the file you downloaded even
though you may have to save the file to disk, then start GSview 
and finally open the file from within the program.
The problem is that different web browsers (even different versions
of the same browser) handle compressed files in different ways.
I have seen browsers who:
- Unzip the file but fail to associate it with the correct 
  viewer even if GSview is installed as Postscript viewer.
- Unzip the file but keep the suffix .gz when saving to disk
  (or maybe it was the other way around).
- Start winzip, which in its turn is unable to start GSview
  when you click on the file. 
- ... you name it!
I have actually seen these problems also in UNIX.
As I mentioned above, GSview is able to uncompress the file
on the fly if necessary. The problem is that you can't
associate the suffix .gz with GSview if you want to be able
to handle also other compressed files.

> Is there a form to get a PDF version of the Manual with the tutorial included.

There was a long discussion between .ps.gz and .pdf on the 
mailing list for the Werner Icking music archive some year
ago and the final conclusion was to switch to PDF as the 
default format. I would recommend the same for our WWW pages.
I know the disadvantage is that you have to build the .pfa
fonts before being able to build the web site.

  /Mats