Re: Is Lilypond right for me?

[Hans Forbrich]

I am far from an expert on this, having used Lilypond for several months and
TeX/LaTeX for several minutes <g>.  However I am so pleased with the quality
of Lilypond and flexibility of LaTeX that I will continue to learn & use both.

You ask:  "will Lilypond allow ..."  I do not think this is really a
restriction from Lilypond, but more an issue of how much you want to learn.
My general comments to your question:

1) Installing Lilypond:

I highly recommend reading the install guides twice before starting, and
ensuring all prerequisites are installed and working.  Once the prerequisites
are in, installing is relatively straightforward.  (Mind you I use the Cygwin
(stable) and the SuSE Linux (development) versions of Lilypond and can not
comment on your OS.

2) Learning Lilypond:

a) If you are looking for beautiful, but unadorned, music then Lilypond is
very, very easy to learn.  Follow the tutorial and you can get output within
minutes of starting (assuming successful install).  I include notes, basic
dynamics and text in this.

b) If you are looking for adornments, multiple voices on a staff, interesting
combinations of staves or lines, and/or fine control over placement, then be
prepared to spend a lot of time.  I have literally spent hundreds of hours
using Lilypond and I get results that make people drool - yet I consider
myself between novice and intermediate.

3) Lilypond and TeX/LaTeX

I'm just getting into this area and I'm starting to use LaTeX, so all I can
offer is thoughts.  I have no idea how TeXShop works and therefore no idea how
realistic the suggestions could be.

Based on my observation, it seems Lilybook basically looks for the
'begin/end{lilypond}' or 'lilypondfile{}' marks in the TeX file, strips those
segments and runs Lilypond on them, creates an interim file and writes a copy
of  the original document with a reference the interim file in place of the
Lilypond 'command'.  You can then run TeX/LaTeX against the re-written
document.  The interim file and the re-written TeX file are left available for
inspection or reuse.

Although it may be a kludge, I see no technical or legal restriction in
copying the resulting reference to the Lilypond interim file to your final
document.  I see some logistics issues, but that is another matter.

Therefore, it should almost be possible to use the following steps (which may
have a negative effect on your layout in TeXShop):

a) write a TeX or LaTex 'master' script to create the interim file (lily-[a
big number].tex)
b) rename the interim file
c) use TeXShop to write your math oriented document
d) reference/include the Lilypond interim in your document - this may be a
manual process.

For your case, you will probably end up with a large number of interim files -
one per music 'segment' that you want to include.

4) Another variant that might be useful: you can create a picture (.png) of
the music which you can embed in your document.  This variant is probably
supported directly by TeXShop.  The negatives include keeping the Lilypond
environment in sync with your document.  I have no experience with .png
generation, but you can use the Search at http://www.lilypond.org/search to
get more information.

HTH
/Hans