Typesetting PNG Examples in Lilypond

Lilypond is a great tool for typesetting music. In the past, I've found preparing examples for publication to be time consuming; tweaking Finale files and solving problems with features not working as they should consumed a lot of time. With Lilypond, I decide on the format of what I want to typeset, enter the notes in a .ly file, and it creates the desired output.

For example, on Ubuntu 16.04 I open gedit (Ubuntu's default text editor), and enter this:

Code Editor

Following this, I save the file as 'test.ly' and navigate to it using the terminal (the keyboard shortcut for opening the terminal in Ubuntu is ctrl+alt+t):

cd Documents

Once in the Documents directory, I enter the following command to generate an png file:

 lilypond -dbackend=eps -dno-gs-load-fonts -dinclude-eps-fonts --png test.ly

This creates, in the same directory, a couple of files, but specifically the file I want, which is 'test.png'.

This is what that file looks like:

This took very little time and gave me exactly what I wanted. The best part about this is that for creating examples for documents, say a harmony book or scale book, I could enter in different notes but keep the formatting in the \paper(...) section, and the example would always output in this fashion. Additionally, both the Ubuntu operating system and Lilypond are freely available for anyone to download and use.