> 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