Writing music with lilypond

A week ago, I spent most of my afternoon helping Ada with her new Debian system.

She’s writing her thesis and for that she needs to have music notes on the document. I’ve insisted her to write her thesis in LaTeX but she still refuses to learn the syntax and commands. So she’s doing it the tough way in OpenOffice.org Writer.

So, to make my point about LaTeX, I was sure there was a way to write music with it. A quick search revealed that a tool called Lilypond was all she needed.

sudo aptitude install lilypond

Fortunately for her, there is also an OpenOffice.org extension that renders the lilypond output as an image on a Writer document.

It took us about an hour to figure out the syntax she needed and after that, she’s happy and ready to finish her thesis.

Ada is happy she switched to OpenOffice.org, if he hadn’t, her thesis wouldn’t have pretty musical notation.