Re: Best practices for book output?

[David Raleigh Arnold]

On Wednesday 01 September 2010 00:03:33 Christopher Meredith wrote:
> I may be in over my head. What I am trying to do is produce a hymnal.
> After much experimentation, I have settled upon a layout I like that
> I am using on a per-hymn basis. I have abstracted these portions of
> my input files and created header.ly and footer.ly. For each
> individual hymn, I then use \include to incorporate the header and
> footer so I have a consistent layout which can be globally updated
> as needed.
> 
> Eventually, I want to compile these into a book. I have experimented
> with lilypond-book but so far am completely lost.

I haven't used lilypond-book lately and I'm not a LaTeX guru but
I feel your pain. ;-(

There isn't much to lilypond-book really. It's a way of including
your music into a LaTeX file, which can produce a hymnal. When I
did this:

http://www.openguitar.com/files/tengtr.pdf

Much of the music consisted in one or two lines so I used
lilypond-book and LaTeX. That's the kind of thing that LaTeX
does decently. Latex takes over spacing between systems
when using lilypond-book. You can see why that was good for
my document and perhaps not so hot for yours. 

You probably want one hymn on each one or two pages. That's
different.

With the necessary LaTeX page breaks you could make the titles
and headers with Latex at the top of each page and include as a
lilypond file only the notation and possibly footers. That way
there would be no problem persuading Latex to make your TOC and
index, title page, preface, afterword, appendix, &c.

Don't even think of putting lilypond code into your latex file.
Your project is too big for that. Make sure each hymn compiles
before including it as a file of whatever type.

If that doesn't work out, it might be better to include whole
finished pdfs or image files rather than lilypond code or files,
as you suggested. Either way, make it easy ;-) on yourself and
do the headers with latex.
Regards, daveA

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