As its name already suggests openlilyib is the heart of this project. The idea came into existence when two LilyPond users, Urs Liska and Janek WarchoĊ‚ worked on a larger-scale edition with LilyPond and organized their tools and helpers in form of a library. Since they got much assistance from the lilypond-user mailing list and as they are interested in Free Software in general they decided to release their work as an open source library.

openlilylib shares some concepts with the LilyPond Snippet Repository in that it provides tools and functions that extend LilyPond's functionality, support document authors and help getting a deeper understanding of LilyPond. But there are also fundamental differences to the LSR:

  • The LSR is an official part of LilyPond while openlilylib is not. Parts of the LSR are also part of the official LilyPond documentation.
  • The LSR works on a given version of LilyPond and can therefore be somewhat hard to keep up to date.
  • While the snippets from the LSR have to be copied and pasted into users' documents, openlilylib is designed as an includable library.
  • openlilylib resides on Github and offers convenient interfaces for collaboration.

The development home page of openlilylib is at GitHub. There you can browse the library and read some examples and documentation. To use openlilylib you can

  • copy snippets directly from the web site,
  • download the whole repository as a ZIP file
    or (preferred)
  • clone the Git repository directly
    (giving you automatic updates and the possibility to contribute)