Latest News

• November 15th, 2009: Frescobaldi 0.7.16 released. (Changes)

This is a Free Software project to make working with the LilyPond music typesetter within KDE very easy. If you are a LilyPond user and you have KDE, then this project might be useful to you.

Currently there are three projects:

• Frescobaldi

A LilyPond sheet music editor for KDE4. It aims to be powerful, yet lightweight and easy to use. You can download it here, and it has its own website at Frescobaldi.org.

• lilypond-kde4 (for KDE 4.1 only)

A base package for KDE 4.1 containing a KatePart indent script, icons and a powerful textedit protocol handler. This can be the foundation for different LilyPond editing apps for KDE 4. The textedit protocol handler opens the preferred editor application when you click on notes in the LilyPond PDF output, but it can also directly interact with specialized LilyPond editing apps. Note: this package will not be needed anymore in KDE 4.2.

You do not need to configure anything if you use lilypond-kde4 with Frescobaldi, but you can use lilypond-kde4 also with other applications in KDE 4:

• Download and install lilypond-kde4
• (optionally) Configure Kate as the preferred editor for the text/x-lilypond MIME type. (Go to System Settings, Advanced, File Associations, text/x-lilypond and place Kate on top. If your system does not know the text/x-lilypond MIME type, upgrade the shared-mime-info package to a recent version. You could also use KWrite, but KWrite opens a new window for every LilyPond file.)
• Run Kate and edit a LilyPond file
• Run LilyPond on the file and open the generated PDF in e.g. Okular
• Click on notes and Kate will jump to the correct file and cursor position

• LilyKDE (for KDE 3.5)

LilyKDE is a full package for LilyPond document editing in KDE 3.5.

The main part of LilyKDE is a plugin for Kate, with the following features:

• A powerful Score Wizard to quickly set up a LilyPond document.
• Input music using a MIDI keyboard or your computer keyboard, using Rumor.
• Run LilyPond and display the PDF. When you click on a note or error message, Kate jumps to the correct document and cursor position.
• After LilyPond has run you can open, email or print PDF documents and play MIDI files with a mouseclick from within Kate.
• Hyphenation of Lyric texts using dictionaries from e.g. OpenOffice.org or Scribus.

The other parts of LilyKDE are:

• MIME type information and an icon for LilyPond files
• A textedit:// service to make the clickable links work anywhere in KDE
• A Konqueror servicemenu and helper app to run LilyPond from within Konqueror on selected files
• Katepart syntax highlighting for LilyPond documents (also part of KDE)

LilyKDE is translated into Dutch, French, Turkish, Spanish, Russian and Italian.

The rest of this page describes the use of LilyKDE 3 extensively.

Quick links: install • use • expand • rumor • features • tips • svn

LilyKDE Screenshots

LilyKDE

The Rumor plugin

The New Score Wizard

How to Install

Install Kate and KPDF (from KDE 3.5.x), Python, PyQt, PyKDE, Pâté, Rumor (optional), and of course LilyPond. If possible use the tools of your operating system to install these prerequisites. (If the Pate site is unavailable, you can get Pate-0.5.1 here. If you have trouble installing Pâté on Kubuntu, look here.)

Then unpack lilykde and type make install. This installs LilyKDE in your home directory. You may look at the README and INSTALL files for other install options.

Next launch Kate and enable the Pate plugin, which enables Kate to use Python plugins. With Pate enabled, select Settings->Configure Python Plugins and enable LilyPond. Click on the Configure tab to see if you need to adjust some commands. The defaults should "just work", however. A command is marked red if it can't be found. You can also configure many other aspects of LilyKDE here.

Now, when editing a LilyPond file in Kate, press Ctrl+Shift+M to get a PDF-preview.

When you right-click one or more LilyPond files in Konqueror you see an action Convert to PDF, which runs LilyPond on the selected files, displaying a log with clickable error messages (if there were any), that open the file in Kate and place the cursor on the relevant spot.

How to use LilyKDE

1. Start Kate, and open a new empty document (Ctrl+N)
2. Run the Score Wizard with Ctrl+Shift+N or from the LilyPond menu:
1. In the first tab Titles and Headers, provide titles and other info
2. In the second tab Parts, select instruments or voices you want to write music for
3. In the third tab Score settings, set the key and time signature, and adjust other options
3. Click OK to get the template document.
4. Write some LilyPond music in the definitions for the voices and/or lyrics, possibily using the Rumor plugin
5. Press Ctrl+Shift+M to let LilyPond make a PDF and view it. When you click on the notes, Kate will jump to the correct place in your text. Where there are errors during the LilyPond run, you can click on them as well.
6. Press Ctrl+Shift+P to create a publishable PDF, without the clickable notes but much smaller in size.

Using the Pate Expand plugin

Pate (the Kate Python framework) also comes with some nice plugins; one of them is Expand. By copying the x-lilypond.conf file to the expand plugins's directory at $HOME/.kde/share/apps/kate/pyplugins/expand/ you can type e.g. oo followed by Ctrl+Space to get the text \once \override. You can edit the shortcut names and their definitions and add new ones as well. Look at the shortcuts for other MIME-types to get ideas. You can even write shortcuts with parameters or complete Python functions.

Using the Rumor plugin

LilyKDE can use Rumor, enabling you to enter music just by playing it on a MIDI keyboard (or even your computer keyboard). This has some limitations: you can only play monophonic music (notes or chords). Rumor also does not support tuplets.

Setting up Rumor

Load the Rumor plugin via the LilyPond menu or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+R. The Rumor panel appears at the bottom. In the panel is a settings dialog where you can configure which MIDI input and output you want to use.

If you have a MIDI keyboard controller but no audible output device you can run an ALSA MIDI-client like TiMidity++. LilyKDE can do this for you when you press the TiMidity-button (you can configure it to run any command in the main config dialog under Settings->Configure Python Plugins...->LilyPond->Configure). LilyKDE remembers the settings, so the next time it will automatically start the MIDI client.

If you have no MIDI-controller you can also set the MIDI input to 'Computer Keyboard' in the settings screen of the Rumor plugin. This way you can play on your computer keyboard like a piano.

Entering music with Rumor

Clicking the REC buttom starts Rumor. If all is well you hear a metronome and you can start playing; you'll see the notes appear. Clicking REC again or pressing Escape stops Rumor. If you already entered the key and time signature in your document, LilyKDE will automatically use it, to interpret alterations correctly. LilyKDE will also output pitches automatically in the language you use in the document.

You can configure the shortest note value to use using the Quantise option.

If you enable the Step checkbox, Rumor will directly output every note played, without a duration.

If you enable the Mono checkbox, Rumor will not output chords, but only single notes.

Under the Settings button you can configure some more settings. A powerful feature of Rumor is that it can load special scripts that change the Rumor output. This is useful when you write e.g. music with complicated rhythms. You can configure which scripts to load, and even put your own Rumor Guile scripts in ~/.kde/share/apps/lilykde/rumor/. More info about writing Rumor scripts is on the Rumor homepage.

Other features

Lyrics hyphenation

LilyKDE can automatically place hyphens ' -- ' inside texts to make those texts usable as lyrics. It can use hyphenation dictionaries of OpenOffice.org, Scribus, KOffice, etc.

To use this feature you must first select the text you want to hyphenate. Then choose Lyrics hyphenation from the LilyPond menu or press Ctrl+Shift+H. In the dialog that appears, select the language. Click OK or press Enter to have the hyphenation take place.

A small limitation is that word processor hyphenation dictionaries often don't want to break a word right after the first letter (e.g. o -- pen), because that does not look nice in word processor texts. So it might be possible that you have add some hyphens after the first letter of such lyrics.

Updating old LilyPond documents

LilyPond's syntax is continuously evolving, and the convert-ly program that ships with LilyPond is invaluable when it comes to updating older LilyPond documents: it can convert older syntax to the newer (in most cases). LilyKDE can run convert-ly for you using the menu option Update with convert-ly in the LilyPond menu.

However, the document needs to contain the \version number it was created for. (If it's not there, just guess a very old version number and put it in the document. If the conversion does not suit you, you can go back by typing Ctrl+Z and try again.)

Working with multiple files

When you are working on a file that just contains music definitions, while another file contains the full score setup, you can put a specially formatted variable in a LilyPond comment to let LilyKDE compile the other file. You can set this separately for preview mode and publish mode. More info here.

The Quick Insert Panel

The Quick Insert Panel is a sidebar that is still in development, containing powerful functions to insert or manipulate music. Currently there are 2 tabs: Articulation and Rhythm. In the Articulations tab you can quickly insert articulations, ornaments and other signs in the current cursor position or to the selected music. The Rhythm tab contains buttons to manipulate the duration of the selected music.

Embedding the LilyPond file in the PDF

From 0.6.1 LilyKDE has a function to embed the .ly file in the PDF. This can be very useful: you can always get back the exact LilyPond file that generated the PDF, even if you change the file later. For this to work, install the PDF ToolKit (PDFTK) and enable the "Embed source" action in the LilyKDE settings. After compiling a LilyPond file, you then see an action "Embed source". Clicking that link calls pdftk to embed the .ly file (and other included files as well) in the PDF. Using pdftk, Acrobat or Okular, you can later extract the attachments from the PDF.

If you want the LilyPond source files always to be embedded when publishing a PDF, you can enable that in the Preferences section of the LilyKDE settings.

LilyKDE tips

How to show the PDF preview: Run LilyPond once or open a document that has an updated PDF in the same directory.

How to show or hide the PDF preview page list: The PDF preview is an embedded KPDF. If you want to hide/show the page list in the PDF preview, give the preview keyboard focus by hiding and then showing it. Now you can press Ctrl+L to hide or show the page list within the preview. You can zoom the preview by dragging the middle mouse button.

How to quickly get a PNG of a LilyPond snippet: Awaiting an automatic PNG generation feature, you can right-drag on the PDF preview and copy a graphic to the clipboard. Then paste it e.g. in KMail and give it a name (with png extension), and it will automatically attached to an email.

How to help

Contributions, like code, icons or translations are very welcome. If you find bugs, please report them in the issue tracker on this site.

Using the sourcecode from SVN

Normally you would just download and install the latest release (see Downloads tab), but if you want to live at the bleeding edge, you can get LilyKDE directly from svn. Install subversion if necessary and then type:

svn checkout http://lilykde.googlecode.com/svn/branches/lilykde/kde3 lilykde
cd lilykde
make
make install

(Trunk is currently being reorganized for porting to KDE4 and does not run at all.)

If you use the SVN source, you need GNU gettext (to build the translations) and ImageMagick version 6.3.x (to generate images of LilyPond objects). Those are already pregenerated in the release tarballs.

If you want keep your copy of the source up-to-date, type

svn update

from within the lilykde directory.