lilyglyphs is a package that lets you use (virtually any) notational item from the LilyPond notation software as a character in the continuous text of (Xe/Lua)LaTeX documents. When I needed that functionality myself I didn't find any reasonable package so I decided to ‘roll my own’. The result is probably the most versatile solution to insert musical elements in text documents you can find today, and thanks to LilyPond it offers exceptional output quality. Different from other approaches I know of lilyglyphs glyphs scale well with the surrounding font size.

Glyphs from LilyPond's Emmentaler music font can be accessed through predefined commands like \clefG (for a G clef) or directly through the glyph name, like \lilyGlyph{scripts.ufermata}. Other symbols which LilyPond draws itself are made accessible through pdf image files but can be used the same way as the font based commands. Python scripts have been provided to streamline the generation of these pdf images, so it has become simple to extend the library of predefined commands.
You can use the package as it is. Extending it with your own predefined commands is simplified if you have Python 2 installed on your machine (you don't need any Python knowledge, though). To add image based commands you also need the (free) LilyPond software.

The package is available through several channels:

  • CTAN: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/luatex/latex/lilyglyphs
  • TeX distributions (you have to check if your distro already contains it)
    For example you can get it from TeXLive2013 by running tlmgr install lilyglyphs
  • Development repository at GitHub: https://github.com/openlilylib/lilyglyphs
    Forking/cloning with Git is the recommended way to get the package because this will always be the most up-to-date version of the package, and it is the best way to contribute new commands.

Before actually trying the package you may download and read the v0.2.1 manual.