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Documentation suggestions

Grand Documentation Project

LilyPond documentation is currently revised in depth. This revision is called the Grand Documentation Project (GDP), it started in September 2007 and will end before 2.14 release. GDP is discuted on the mailing lists, which you can search the archives and suscribe to for more information

If you plan to make any documentation suggestion or submission, it is a good idea to know about GDP progress by reading lilypond-devel and lilypond-user mailing lists, so your contributions can be efficiently integrated into the GDP. You can find detailed instructions for contributing to GDP at Manuals Readme.

Small additions

For additions to the documentation,

• Tell us where the addition should be placed. Please include both the section number and title (i.e. "2.13 Printing lyrics").
• Please write exact changes to the text.
• A formal patch to the source code is not required; we can take care of the technical details. Here is an example of a perfect documentation report:

  To: lilypond-devel@gnu.org
  From: helpful-user@example.net
  Subject: doc addition 
  
  In section 2.13 (printing lyrics), above the last line ("More options, like..."),
  please add:
      
  ----
  To add lyrics to a divided part, use blah blah blah.  For example,
  
  \score {
   \notes {blah <<blah>> }
   \lyrics {blah <<blah>> }
   blah blah blah
  }
  ----
  
  In addition, the second sentence of the first paragraph is
  confusing.  Please delete that sentence (it begins "Users
  often...") and replace it with this:
  ----
  To align lyrics with something, do this thing.
  ----
  
  Have a nice day,
  Helpful User
  

Larger contributions

To replace large sections of the documentation, the guidelines are stricter. We cannot remove parts of the current documentation unless we are certain that the new version is an improvement.

• Split your work into small sections; this makes it much easier to compare the new and old documentation.
• Please prepare a formal patch with diff -u
• Ask on the lilypond-devel maillist if such a rewrite is necessary.

Once you have followed these guidelines, please send a message to lilypond-devel with your documentation submissions. Unfortunately there is a strict “no top-posting” check; to avoid this, add

> I'm not top posting.

(you must include the > ) to the top of your documentation addition.

We may edit your suggestion for spelling, grammar, or style, and we may not place the material exactly where you suggested, but if you give us some material to work with, we can improve the manual much faster. Thanks for your interest!

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