> From the attached photo you will see that I created in 'home' a
> folder called 'LilyPondArea', and in that a folder called
> 'lilypond-2.24.2'. In the former I placed the downloaded tar, and in
> the latter the unpacked files of lilypond-2.24.2 (i.e. 'bin', etc)
Looks good.
> I use Textedit to create and save a 'file.ly' as directed and I saved
> it in lilypond-2.24.2, i.e. with bin, etc.
I strongly recommend that you do *not* do that. You should rather use
a separate directory to store your `.ly` files. It's far too easy to
accidentally delete the whole 'lilypond-2.24.2' directory if you
upgrade to, say 'lilypond-2.24.3'.
> Now (moment of truth). I open Terminal, go to 'home', create the
> path to bin, as:- ~/LilyPondArea/lilypond-2.24.2/bin
What do you mean with 'create a path'? Assuming you have created file
`foo.ly` in directory `~/MyLilyPondDocs/`, and you are currently in
this directory (which you can check in the terminal by calling the
`pwd` command) it is sufficient to call the LilyPond binary with the
whole path:
```
~/LilyPondArea/lilypond-2.24.2/bin/lilypond foo.ly
```
> By listing ('ls'), I note that file.ly is in there with bin, but as
> file.ly.txt .
This is strange. It looks like an artifact of your editor. LilyPond
doesn't care how the file is actually called (it's a Windows thing to
rely on file extensions), but normally it has extension `.ly` – maybe
you have to change the preferences of your editor to not automatically
add `.txt` to the file name.
Assuming that you can't change that for whatever reason, running
LilyPond on a file `foo.ly.txt` works just fine, too. However, the
resulting PDF file is then called `foo.ly.pdf`.
> (I believe a genuine lilypond file is just a text file with suffix
> '.ly'.)
Correct.
> The manual instructions say "you can run"
> /.../lilypond-x.y.z/bin/lilypond file.ly
> But what do you/they mean by "run"?
'Run' means to type a command into the terminal and execute it by
pressing the Enter key.
> Do I still have to change permissions, as indicated by Hans Åberg?
Theoretically, everything should be fine. Maybe there are some
special precautions due to MacOS restrictions (which I don't know,
sorry), but I guess you have to take care of them only the first time.
> Do I still have to use 'sudo' as indicated by Hans Åberg?
No. You have unpacked the LilyPond tar bundle in your home directory,
to which you have full access.
Werner
