Re: Catch notes

On 25/07/2025 07:13, Kim Shrier wrote: On Jul 24, 2025, at 1:54 PM, Raphael Mankin wrote: How would one print catch notes: at the bottom of each RH page print the first note of the next LH page as a kind of look-ahead? Perhaps a custos would accomplish what you are after. https

Re: Catch notes

On 24/07/2025 22:12, Hans Aikema wrote: Op 24 jul 2025 om 21:56 heeft Raphael Mankin het volgende geschreven: How would one print catch notes: at the bottom of each RH page print the first note of the next LH page as a kind of look-ahead? First instinct: you would try to avoid

Catch notes

How would one print catch notes: at the bottom of each RH page print the first note of the next LH page as a kind of look-ahead?

Re: Question from a Mac user who no longer can use Lilypond and Frescobaldi

On 21/07/2025 19:56, Robert Schmaus via LilyPond user discussion wrote: Dear Lilypond community, [snip] So I guess my questions are this: Would I be better off, using Lilypond and Frescobaldi on a Windows machine? My hope is: For Windows, you get some .exe files that already contain everyth

Re: Grob transformers

On 19/06/2025 17:53, Werner LEMBERG wrote: Speaking as a programmer of 60 years experience, lambdas give me the willies - and I started with Jensen's Device in Algol60 when Algol60 was new. Yes, lambdas are neat, but IMO they tend to be unreadable and unmaintainable. If you like them, use t

Re: Grob transformers

On 19/06/2025 17:27, Valentin Petzel wrote: Hello Pondmates! In Lilypond we have this wonderful but weird sugar function `grob- transformer`. While this thing is nice it is also a bit awkward. For one thing it requires specification of *what* is transformed (for else it does not know that inf

Re: Markups attached to elements other than notes?

On 22/05/2025 08:34, James Harkins wrote: I'd like to attach a performance direction to the right edge of a particular bar. If I could \markup \right-align and attach to the barline, it would be so easy, but markups seem to apply only to notes or rests. Complicating matters is that there ar

Re: \textMark doesn't collapse identical contents

On 07/04/2025 03:07, James Harkins wrote: OK, now a real question (after -- I think -- RTFMing this time). I was looking for a way to have a text mark, e.g. '15-20" electronics' -- appear only once at the top of a score system, while also appearing in each of the parts (in the way that a re

Re: BalloonText help

On 21/02/2025 11:10, Valentin Petzel wrote: Hello all, Hello, Use \balloonGrobText before a note or -\balloonText after a note within chords. Here you use the latter but not within a chord. You could write 4 Or \balloonGrobText #'NoteHead #'(-2 . -2) \markup {\bold "crotchet in orig

Re: BalloonText help

On 20/02/2025 07:24, Werner LEMBERG wrote: Use \balloonGrobText before a note or -\balloonText after a note within chords. NR 1.7.2 says "typically within chords,"; it does not say "only within chords". Maybe the NR needs updating. It seems that you are a native speaker. Can you sugges

Re: BalloonText help

On 18/02/2025 00:16, David Wright wrote: On Mon 17 Feb 2025 at 21:43:43 (+), Raphael Mankin wrote: I have tried both your suggestions and I get no errors, but no output whatsoever. I am using the standard Ubuntu package of Frescobaldi+Lilypond. Amended MWE attached Your attachment

Re: BalloonText help

On 17/02/2025 19:36, Xavier Scheuer wrote: On Mon, 17 Feb 2025 at 19:56, Raphael Mankin <mailto:r...@mankin.org.uk>> wrote: > > I cannot get BalloonText to work. I have copied as literally as I can > from NR 1.7.2 Hello, Use \balloonGrobText before a note or -\balloo

BalloonText help

I cannot get BalloonText to work. I have copied as literally as I can from NR 1.7.2 I get: Interpreting music... /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lilypond/2.24.3/share/lilypond/2.24.3/ly/init.ly:65:2: error: Guile signaled an error for the expression beginning here # (let ((book-handler (if (define

Re: Song verses with variant rhythms

I finally have a fairly complete solution to the problem. The examples in NR 2.1.3 did not quite cut the mustard of switching back and forth between a main melody and one or more alternates. There are a couple of gotchas: 1. There must be a "\new Voice" for

Re: Song verses with variant rhythms

On 11/02/2025 03:45, David Wright wrote: On Mon 10 Feb 2025 at 12:00:23 (+), Raphael Mankin wrote: On 10/02/2025 10:17, Timothy Lanfear wrote: On 09/02/2025 10:09, Raphael Mankin wrote: Attached is a MWE. I tried using explicit syllable lengths, but it appears that they were ignored

Re: Song verses with variant rhythms

On 10/02/2025 10:17, Timothy Lanfear wrote: On 09/02/2025 10:09, Raphael Mankin wrote: Attached is a MWE. I tried using explicit syllable lengths, but it appears that they were ignored. So writing "rhythm4" or "jer8 -- "ky8" does nothing. Switching t

Re: [OT] PDF manipulation mystery

You may find the pdfarranger program useful for doing this in a GUI. Of course, if you really want a scripted solution then your current way is better. raph@X1:~/src/Music/Songs$ dpkg -s pdfarranger Package: pdfarranger Status: install ok installed Priority: optional Section: graphics Installed

Re: Oly says "No CAIRO backend"

On 09/02/2025 13:30, K. Blum wrote: Am 09.02.2025 um 13:40 schrieb lilypond-user-requ...@gnu.org: pdf2svg is already installed, but I have not yet discovered a magic utterance that persuades Oly to use it. Coul

Re: Oly says "No CAIRO backend"

On 09/02/2025 12:09, K. Blum wrote: Hi Raphael, Am 09.02.2025 um 10:16 schrieb Raphael Mankin: I have tried twiddling settings in the config section of Oly in a hope of getting to use ps2svg, but with no success the package you need is named "pdf2svg". Probably you need to ins

Re: Song verses with variant rhythms

Attached is a MWE. I tried using explicit syllable lengths, but it appears that they were ignored. So writing "rhythm4" or "jer8 -- "ky8" does nothing. Switching the order of the voices in << ... >> made no difference; it always aligned to the shorter notes. So " << c4 \\ {a8 a8 } >>" or "<

Re: Oly says "No CAIRO backend"

On 08/02/2025 12:16, Valentin Petzel wrote: Hello Raphael, I am on Xubuntu 24.04. Which Cairo package am I missing? I suppose you are using the system package for Lilypond? The cairo backend is still experimental, so the Debian maintainers might have configured the build to not use ca

Re: Oly says "No CAIRO backend"

On 08/02/2025 09:52, K. Blum wrote: Hi William, Am 08.02.2025 um 10:42 schrieb lilypond-user-requ...@gnu.org: If you didn't already, can you try adding `-dbackend=cairo` before the filename? Like this lilypond -dbackend=cairo file.ly that's what OLy already does when calling the LilyPond

Re: Song verses with variant rhythms

On 07/02/2025 18:21, Timothy Lanfear wrote: On 07/02/2025 16:40, David Wright wrote: You can add the lyrics to the Staff instead of each voice. You just have to add _ to each set of lyrics so that there's a syllable for every moment in the staff, ie both voices. Following on from David's ti

Re: Song verses with variant rhythms

On 07/02/2025 14:42, Knute Snortum wrote: On Fri, Feb 7, 2025 at 5:23 AM Raphael Mankin <mailto:r...@mankin.org.uk>> wrote: __ Sometimes a song has slightly different rhythms in different verses, as in the (wonky) scan below Is there a neat way of setting such s

Re: Song verses with variant rhythms

On 07/02/2025 13:57, Brian Barker wrote: At 13:21 07/02/2025 +, you wrote: Sometimes a song has slightly different rhythms in different verses, ... Is there a neat way of setting such songs? All the ways that I can think of are somewhat of a faff. I'll leave the experts to suggest dupl

Oly says "No CAIRO backend"

I have installed the Oly extension, but when I try a minimal test I get the following: Processing `/home/raph/.cache/ooolilypond/tmp/OOoLilyPond.ly' Parsing... Interpreting music... Preprocessing graphical objects... Calculating line breaks... Drawing systems... fatal error: compiled without CAI

Re: Linux OS

On 03/02/2025 17:55, Brian O'Folan wrote: Hello. I downloaded Lilypond 2.24.4 and Frescobaldi 3.3.0 onto My Mac Monterey OS system and had frustrating results. I plan to get a laptop with a Linux OS and wondered if someone could advise a LInux distro that has these packages or something simi

Re: Spectacle sign

On 19/01/2025 14:39, Michael Werner wrote: It's an available markup command, listed at https://lilypond.org/doc/ v2.24/Documentation/notation/other Short version: \markup{\eyeglasses} Thank you. I was searching for the wrong w

Spectacle sign

Is there a spectacle (watch the conductor) glyph in Lilypond? I haven't found one.

Re: Convert chord mode into multi-voice mode

On 20/12/2024 12:18, Frédéric wrote: Hi, I want to adapt a piano score for a small set of instruments. The right hand is already written as a set of chords with 2 notes ... Is there a way to turn it into a set of 2 voices { a b } \\ { c' d' }? Thanks, F I would use a little perl or python s

Re: Labeling a chordNames staff

Thank you On 15/12/2024 11:25, David Kastrup wrote: Raphael Mankin writes: Is it possible to label a chordNames staff much as instrumentName labels a music staff? Motivation: In popular music it is common to have more than one harmonisation of a tune. I would like to label them as to source

Labeling a chordNames staff

Is it possible to label a chordNames staff much as instrumentName labels a music staff? Motivation: In popular music it is common to have more than one harmonisation of a tune. I would like to label them as to source/style/...

Re: Scope of defined names

"variables", does that mean that they can be redefined or are they set-once? Saul On Sun, Dec 1, 2024, 3:16 PM Raphael Mankin <mailto:r...@mankin.org.uk>> wrote: What is the scope of a defined name? If I write, for instance: tune = { a b c d } Is the scope  of

Scope of defined names

What is the scope of a defined name? If I write, for instance: tune = { a b c d } Is the scope of the name "tune" the whole compilation unit, the smallest enclosing book, book part, score, bracketed expression ...? Can it be redefined in an inner or in a parallel scope? I have not spotted t

Re: Layout going screwy

On 04/09/2024 11:15, David Kastrup wrote: Raphael Mankin writes: For reasons that not concern us I am re-typing Cole Porter's Anything Goes. I get as far as the key change after bar 20 but then the layout goes wild: no bar numbers, line breaks fail, stray bar on the end. I have ch

Re: Null midi device

On 26/08/2024 09:56, David Kastrup wrote: Raphael Mankin writes: Is there a null midi device so that I can say explicitly that I do not want midi output for this staff, as opposed to "I have forgotten to specify it"? Does something like \new Staff \with { \remove "

Null midi device

Is there a null midi device so that I can say explicitly that I do not want midi output for this staff, as opposed to "I have forgotten to specify it"?

Re: lilyjazz fonts not working

On 19/08/2024 10:27, Mark Probert wrote: And to add on, updating the fonts needs to be done for each new release of LP. I downloaded the fonts and then use a script that has the version number and base location, such as... —script REV = “2.24.4" LILY = "/opt/homebrew/share/lilypond"   cp

Re: Song with repeat and partial

On 10/08/2024 11:01, Valentin Petzel wrote: I was hoping there was a neat trick that did not involve stubs. But if that is the "traditional" way of doing things I mean, what du you want to see in the end? This sort of notation is very common in vocal music. I know it is common, that w

Re: Song with repeat and partial

On 09/08/2024 09:54, Valentin Petzel wrote: I have a song with an intro, several stanzas, and a refrain. Each stanza starts on the last beat of the measure.See the attached MWE. Is there a neat way of avoiding having a repeat bar in the middle of a measure while preserving the stanza numbers

Re: Song with repeat and partial

On 09/08/2024 04:48, David Wright wrote: On Wed 07 Aug 2024 at 14:43:32 (+0100), Raphael Mankin wrote: Is there a neat way of avoiding having a repeat bar in the middle of a measure while preserving the stanza numbers is their proper places? I wasn't aware tha

Song with repeat and partial

This is a follow-up from a question I asked a few weeks back. I have a song with an intro, several stanzas, and a refrain. Each stanza starts on the last beat of the measure.See the attached MWE. Is there a neat way of avoiding having a repeat bar

Re: Song: multiple verses and refrain

On 10/07/2024 07:46, Hans Aikema wrote: On 10 Jul 2024, at 06:14, David Wright wrote: On Mon 08 Jul 2024 at 22:48:00 (+0100), Raphael Mankin wrote: That is great, thanks. I have not yet got my head around context naming. Clearly I shall have to do some more reading. But you need to

Re: Song: multiple verses and refrain

On 08/07/2024 22:12, Mats Bengtsson wrote: On 2024-07-08 21:40, Raphael Mankin wrote: An alternative to the already proposed solutions is to name the Lyrics context that you want to keep, and then reuse it for the refrain: \version "2.24.3" melody = { \relative c'    

Re: Song: multiple verses and refrain

On 08/07/2024 19:53, Mats Bengtsson wrote: On 2024-07-08 15:37, Raphael Mankin wrote: I am having difficulty layout  satisfactorily a song that has 3 verses and a refrain. The refrain comes on a separate line from the verses. It looks unsightly, and wastes space on the page. Neither NR nor

Re: Song: multiple verses and refrain

Yes, that works, thank you. Not as elegant a solution as I would like, in that it mixes verse with refrain, but it works. On 08/07/2024 14:46, Christopher R. Maden wrote: On 7/8/24 09:37, Raphael Mankin wrote: I am having difficulty layout  satisfactorily a song that has 3 verses and a

Song: multiple verses and refrain

I am having difficulty layout satisfactorily a song that has 3 verses and a refrain. The refrain comes on a separate line from the verses. It looks unsightly, and wastes space on the page. Neither NR nor LM seem to address this case. I attach my MWE. But here is the .ly:

Re: French lyrics and accented characters

On 04/07/2024 16:48, Jean Abou Samra wrote: Le jeudi 04 juillet 2024 à 15:21 +0100, Raphael Mankin a écrit : Anyhow, I persist in my opinion that facilitating the input of accented characters is best done at a level different than LilyPond. I don't disagree with you. Using a compose

Re: French lyrics and accented characters

On 04/07/2024 09:57, Jean Abou Samra wrote: Le jeudi 04 juillet 2024 à 08:09 +0100, Raphael Mankin a écrit : I already use these, but they are incomplete. Thanks to all who replied; I obviously struck a nerve, and i10n is still an issue in spite of utf8. I beg to differ. IMHO, entering

Re: French lyrics and accented characters

On 03/07/2024 20:33, Simon Albrecht wrote: Hi Valentin, On 03.07.24 14:31, Valentin Petzel wrote: I’ve taken some time to create a function for decoding html-style entities. wow, that’s a great bit of initiative! I’m really sorry that only upon seeing this I remembered the text-replacemen

Re: French lyrics and accented characters

need. Cheers, Valentin Am Mittwoch, 3. Juli 2024, 11:14:52 MESZ schrieb Jean Abou Samra: Le mercredi 03 juillet 2024 à 08:26 +0100, Raphael Mankin a écrit : Thank you. The obvious is what generally escapes one. But character picking is a PITA. I shall have to add a French keyboard to my layouts.

Re: French lyrics and accented characters

On 02/07/2024 22:25, Jean Abou Samra wrote: I have tried all sorts of  things, but how  do I get French accented characters in lyrics and markup? Uh… just write them directly: \version "2.24.2" \markup { Quelques caractères accentués } \lyrics { É à û Ï } Thank you. The obvious is what

French lyrics and accented characters

I have tried all sorts of things, but how do I get French accented characters in lyrics and markup? --

Re: Alternating styles of TimeSignatures

I asked a similar question a while back and this is the answer I received: On Thu, Feb 1, 2024 at 10:50 AM Raphael Mankin wrote: I have music with alternate bars in 3/4 and 6/8. The usual way to indicate this is to put both time signatures at the start, but I can find no way

Re: General question: scores and parts

ece = "Part High" }    <<   \new Devnull \structure   \new StaffGroup << \new Staff \high   >>    >> } \score {    \header { piece = "Part Low" }    <<   \new Devnull \structure   \new StaffGroup << \new

General question: scores and parts

When one writes a score various annotations, e.g. tempo changes, are attached only to the top staff. When one generates separate parts one want those annotations on every part. If I attach the annotations to every part the parts are correct, but I get warnings in the full score but the appeara

Re: Spacing of chords on a chord lead sheet

On 11/05/24 01:59, Kieren MacMillan wrote: Hi Raphael, However, the chord names are mono-spaced; they are not spaced according to their durations. So that if, for instance, I  have {ef2 ef4:maj7 ef4:7} then each symbol occupies the same amount of space on the line. The first chord does not

Spacing of chords on a chord lead sheet

I have generated a chord lead sheet for a bass player with just the chords on it (\chordMode, no notes). After some fiddling I got the bar lines and repeats printed. However, the chord names are mono-spaced; they are not spaced according to their durations. So that if, for instance, I have

Re: Frescobaldi... panic alternatives?

This is a much better description of Neovim than exists on any of the Neovim web-sites. They all jump straight into detail without telling one what the whole thing is about. I struggled to work out what Neovim is, or why I should want to use it. On 02/05/2024 05:33, Kenneth Flak wrote: OK, g

Re: score with dynamic beats

I note that in one solution one uses \remove and in the other \omit to achieve the same thing. Is there any prospect of moving to a situation where only one operator is used to achieve a result, possibly by having a preferred and deprecated options first? This is a general point, not just re

Re: Can't compile Lilypond files

On 24/03/2024 21:26, David Sumbler wrote: On Sun, 2024-03-24 at 21:55 +0100, Lukas-Fabian Moser wrote: [snip] What I don't understand is why or how it always used to work, but I suppose there's no point in worrying about that. I have lost count of the number of projects over the past sev

Re: B.A.C.H. motif

That is so silly that I love it. On 19/03/2024 13:27, Xavier Scheuer wrote: On Tue, 19 Mar 2024 at 13:57, Peter Mayes > wrote: > > Being relatively new to this forum, I suspect I am not the first person > to ask this. > > And it is more out of curiosity than nec

Re: Question regarding ChordNames

On 13/03/2024 03:50, John Helly wrote: Aloha. Here's an MWE to exhibit the issue. I have a flat note (bes) that I want to transpose down 4 half-tones to F#.  However, when the transpose is applied, the result is Gb.  I understand that a flat note was the initial value so maybe LP is prese

Re: snippet

On 11/03/2024 16:54, Gian Paolo Renello wrote: HI, I searched on lilypond site a way to rewrite a SATB on 2 staves, but i am not able to got it... Does any one have a clue on it? Thanks a lot Gian Paolo Here is the image i got form the score. Look at \partCombine. I use it to generate a s

Re: Control breaks in staff that I get from a variable?

On 10/03/2024 12:41, Ole V. Villumsen wrote: The classic fix is << \new Devnull { s1*5 \break } \staffIGot This was exactly what I was after. It’s nice and simple and works well. Thank you. I might wish for it being better documented. I see Devnull documented well in the Internal

Re: French Horn - transposing

On 10/03/2024 01:14, TJ Kolev wrote: Thank you all for your suggestions and time. I ended up using \transpose which was the easiest for me to understand, and worked great it seems. Cheers! tjk :) And I learned something new w.r.t \quote* operators, which I did not know existed. On Sa

Re: Adding to a tagGroup on the fly

On 02/03/2024 11:44, David Kastrup wrote: Simon Albrecht writes: On 01.03.24 14:29, David Kastrup wrote: Simon Albrecht writes: The downside of that is that I cannot add more tags to those groups on the fly, and always have to add them directly to the library file.) Suggestions for a u

Re: Anyone know this ornament?

The last bar of the 3rd system has it not followed by a chord. Maybe arpeggio or roulade as appropriate in the context. On 19/02/2024 18:28, Engraver wrote: This is a screenshot of the entire page. Op 19-2-2024 om 19:25 schreef Stefan Thomas: Dear Auke, I don't know this ornament either bu

Re: Alternate bars in different time signatures

On 03/02/2024 23:45, Valentin Petzel wrote: Am Freitag, 2. Februar 2024, 16:38:22 CET schrieb Lukas-Fabian Moser: ... and without any new insight, but with a healthy dose of syntactic sugar: And with a rather simple custom engraver Lilypond will do these kinds of things for us. I know, b

Re: Alternate bars in different time signatures

e 4 or more quavers. On 01/02/2024 20:10, Knute Snortum wrote: On Thu, Feb 1, 2024 at 10:50 AM Raphael Mankin <mailto:r...@mankin.org.uk>> wrote: I have music with alternate bars in 3/4 and 6/8. The usual way to indicate this is to  put both  time signatures at the start, but 

Alternate bars in different time signatures

I have music with alternate bars in 3/4 and 6/8. The usual way to indicate this is to put both time signatures at the start, but I can find no way to do this. I have tried "\time 3/4 <> \time 6/8", but I only get the last one. Note, this is not a compound time of 3/4+6/8, but alternating

Re: zero-duration s to hold marks

As a more general response to this thread, I feel that the reference manual needs to have more cross references. I frequently get a bit lost trying to find a suitable construct, or discovering what a construct means. This thread has already shown that 1.2.2, 1.3.* and 1.5.* need to cross-refer

Re: zero-duration s to hold marks

On 10/01/2024 10:35, msk...@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca wrote: On Wed, 10 Jan 2024, Raphael Mankin wrote: That strikes me as being a programmer's response, and I speak as a programmer for over 50 years. Using <> works, but it is unintuitive. If s0 is more intuitive then that should be con

Re: zero-duration s to hold marks

On 09/01/2024 18:35, Paul Scott wrote: On 1/9/24 11:29 AM, John Asmuth wrote: Hi lilypond, I have two users for a s0 (except it tells me 0 is not a duration). <> does what I believe you want:  <>_\< HTH, Paul That strikes me as being a programmer's response, and I speak as a programm

Re: Output PDF to stdout

On 05/01/2024 03:46, David Wright wrote: On Thu 04 Jan 2024 at 23:34:28 (+0100), Volodymyr Prokopyuk wrote: I know that lilypond can receive a source.ly file from the stdin by using lilypond -. Is it possible for lilypond to output PDF to the stdout? My motivation behind using lilypond in a

Re: Running a system command from within Lilypond [Solved]

On 15/12/2023 16:23, Jean Abou Samra wrote: I am on version Frescobaldi 3.2 and Lilypond 2.22.1 and do not appear to have that option. At least, I have not found it. Anyway, I have "automatic engraving" on. It's in Edit > Preferences > LilyPond Preferences > Running LilyPond > Save document

Re: Running a system command from within Lilypond [Solved]

On 15/12/2023 16:06, Jean Abou Samra wrote: [Later] The error I am getting now is: Processing `/tmp/frescobaldi-duowk0s5/tmpz726e77a/testGit.ly'   Parsing...fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git If the path is in |/tmp/|, it means that you did not save yo

Re: Running a system command from within Lilypond [Solved]

Thank you for the very prompt response. I had tried popen, but with no luck. I will give it another go.I do not now remember what it originally said, if anything. [Later] The error I am getting now is: Processing `/tmp/frescobaldi-duowk0s5/tmpz726e77a/testGit.ly' Parsing...fatal: not a gi

Running a system command from within Lilypond

Motivation: I keep my Lilypond files in a git repository. I would like to interpolate the repo's version number in the Lilypond output by running a command like "git log|head -1". I can do this from raw Scheme using the system() function, but this does not seem to work in Lilypond. So, now