Re: Help getting started

[Jim Sabatke]

Joe Neeman wrote:
> > I don't think it's possible to use lilypond without lots of painful 
> > research.  I haven't been able to find an index, or google search that 
> > will reliably return simple information.
>
>
> In my opinion, the most important piece of missing documentation is one 
> that describes the basic syntactic and grammatic structure of lilypond. 
> I have learned quite a lot by following examples, but I still don't 
> really understand what lots of things do. Whenever anyone learns a 
> language like C, there are lots of documents/text books that say things 
> like: "this is an expression", "this is the structure of a funcion 
> call", "this is how to write a function declaration", etc. In lilypond, 
> all the examples say is: "this is how to change the stem width". They 
> don't say "this is the general format for changing an engraving 
> property" or "this is how the \score block is structured".
>
> If anyone else is interested, I think we should try to write a 
> comprehensive guide to the stucture of the lilypond language. I'd do it 
> myself, but I don't know most of the answers...

I agree.  I asked before "what is the structure of an ly 
file?"  I never got an answer.  That leaves me guessing from 
examples.  I was using 2.3.1 for a while, until I found out 
that some of the formatting doesn't work yet.  When I went 
back to 2.2.1, I had to make major changes to a simple 
layout to get it to parse.

I'm researching "how do I make a note head smaller" because 
I need to fit a few more notes on a line to keep it from 
going nuts and extending lines way past explicit "\break" 
commands.  I've googled and grep'd tons of documents, and I 
still don't know how to do it.  I've found possible 
solutions, but the syntax doesn't seem to work anywhere I 
place the commands.  I've tried searching the lilypond wiki 
site, but the searches returns mostly hits on how to setup 
the wiki.

I'd like to see a wiki site setup for people to share 
solutions to problems, and to begin to document how to do 
things in lilypond.

Lilypond needs an honest to goodness user manual.  I don't 
fault the developers; they are still developing and 
documenting as best as they can.  A good start would be to 
layout the syntax for basic usage.

Endless trial and error is really discouraging.

--
Jim Sabatke
Hire Me!! - See my resume at http://my.execpc.com/~jsabatke

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are crunchy 
and good with ketchup.