@comment @c -*-texinfo-*-

@node Preface
@unnumbered Preface


It must have been during a rehearsal of the EJE (Eindhoven Youth
Orchestra), somewhere in 1995 that Jan, one of the cranked violists
told Han-Wen, one of the distorted French horn players, about the
grand new project he was working on.  It was an automated system for
printing music (to be precise, it was MPP, a preprocessor for
MusiXTeX).  As it happened, Han-Wen accidentally wanted to print out
some parts from a score, so he started looking at the software, and he
quickly got hooked.  It was decided that MPP was a dead end. After
lots of philosophizing and heated e-mail exchanges Han-Wen started
LilyPond in 1996.  This time, Jan got sucked into Han-Wen's new
project.

In some ways, developing a computer program is like learning to play
an instrument. In the beginning, discovering how it works is fun, and
the things you can't do are challenging. After the initial excitement,
you have to practice and practice. Scales and studies can be dull, and
if you aren't motivated by others---teachers, conductors or
audience---it is very tempting to give up. You continue, and gradually
playing becomes a part of your life. Some days it comes naturally, and
it's wonderful, and on some days it just doesn't work, but you keep
playing, day after day.

Like making music, working on LilyPond is can be dull work, and on
some days it feels like plodding through a morass of
bugs. Nevertheless, it has become a part of our life, and we keep
doing it. Probably the most important motivation is that our program
actually does something useful for people. When we browse around the
net we find many people that use LilyPond, and use it to produce
impressive pieces of sheet music.  Seeing that still feels unreal, but
in a very pleasant way.

Our users not only give us good vibes by using our program, many of
them also help us by giving suggestions and sending bugreports. So
first and foremost, we would like to thank all users that sent us
bugreports, gave suggestions or contributed in any other way to
LilyPond.

We would also like to thank the following people: Mats Bengtsson for
the incountable number of questions he answered on the mailing list,
and Rune Zedeler for his energy in finding and fixing bugs.  Nicola
Bernardini for inviting us to his workshop on music publishing, which
was truly a masterclass, and Heinz Stolba and James Ingram for
teaching us there. 

Playing and printing music is more than nice analogy: programming
together is a lot of fun, and helping people is deeply satisfying, but
ultimately, working on LilyPond is a way to express our deep love for
music. May it help you create lots of beautiful music!

Han-Wen and Jan

Utrecht/Eindhoven, The Netherlands, July 2002.


