Mimicking the Real Book Look

Stop! If you have never heard of "Real Book" or "Fake Book", go look it up and then come back.

(no really, go ahead... I'll wait for you...)

Done? Good. Now, hopefully you are more familiar with what a Real Book score looks like, so let's move forward.

A Small Holiday Gift

So, I've not been able to keep this blog as up-to-date as I'd like to. To remedy that a little, here's a small holiday gift to you. This gift was originally given by Mark Adler on the Finale Blog, but since he offered it freely, I decided to pass it along, with a little extra for all the LilyPond users out there.

New LilyPond Templates (part 2)

As promised, here is the second installment of templates. I've created templates for Rock and Pop, Jazz, and Latin style scores.

New LilyPond Templates (part 1)

Greetings, everyone!

It feels strange to (once again) not have put up a post before another month passed, but, alas, it has happened again. Let's remedy the situation!

I've decided to take it upon myself to create a small library of LilyPond 2.18.2 template files that are inspired by those found in the latest version of Sibelius (7.5). When all is said and done, I plan on replicating ALL of its templates in the following categories:

1. No Category
2. Solo Instruments
3. Band
4. Chamber Groups
5. Choral and Song
6. Handbells
7. Jazz
8. Latin
9. Marching Band and Percussion
10. Orchestral
11. Orff Instruments
12. Rock and Pop

So far, I've got #1 and 2 done, but hopefully will be able to pick up the pace and get the others cranked out. I've tried to follow Sibelius' designs as faithfully as possible in hopes that Sibelius users who are familiar with them will find the change over to LilyPond that much easier.

Recent Developments

Wow, over a whole month has gone by without a post. Well, I've been busy working on myriad of (mostly font-related) projects. I'm still not quite done with most of them, but here are some highlights of my latest adventures that will hopefully be released soon:

Font Update (Improviso, Ross, Profondo)

Another set of updates have been applied and are now available on my font site: fonts.openlilylib.org. Here are the highlights:

• Improviso (v1.1)
• Fixed a bad contour in the clefs.C_change glyph.
• Packaged three hand-written text fonts (one of my own creation) to compliment the font style.
• Ross (v1.1)
• Thickened up the scripts.tenuto articulation (which also updated the up and down portato).
• Added information about the IM FELL text fonts.
• Profondo (no version change)
• Packaged my tuplet number font so the style is more consistent (the glyphs come from Bravura). The \override is now part of the default profondo.ily stylesheet.

If you haven't been over there in a while, go check them out and let me know if something is not working correctly!

Do you have a score that uses one of your favorite music fonts? Let me know so I can add it as an example on the respective font page!

Happy Engraving!

Update to fonts website!

I'm proud to announce a few nice updates to fonts.openlilylib.org today! I had wanted to make some changes and add a few things since the last major update and I finally got around to it. Here are the changes:

• Updated fonts: A few fonts had "hole" artifacts from overlapping contours when using certain programs to view the glyphs (such as Inkscape, Adobe Acrobat PDF, etc.). These have now been fixed and any future use of these glyphs should result in the proper forms. Specifically, the fonts affected by this update are: Beethoven, Improviso, LilyJAZZ, Ross, and Scorlatti. If you notice any others, let me know!


• Font stylesheets: A few minor additions to the stylesheets have been included and on each page there is now a direct link to the respective stylesheet itself for easier viewing and downloading.


• Font viewer: I've added a convenient way to quickly look through the main glyphs in each font and compare them to others. This is what I'd wanted to do for some time and now it's finally here. Go check it out!



• Documentation: All documentation about installation and usage that used to be on the main page has been moved to a dedicated page to keep the landing page simpler. As always, if a link is broken, I want to hear about it.

I always am trying to improve the look-and-feel of the page, so you may see some minor changes there too. Are things working on your machine/browser? Do you like the changes? Let me know in the comments!