How become an Lilypond developer (and now need tab devs)

studio32 · Post by **studio32** » Wed Mar 25, 2009 1:50 pm

Maybe it's interesting to see what you can do for the Lilypond project and learn some (postscript) developing. You can first become a Frog (LilyPond bug-hunter / student programmer )

more info about Frog: http://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php ... frog#p3690

More info about developing for Lilypond:
http://lilypond.org/web/devel/participating/

At this moment there are some guys beginning to work on more and better tablature functionality for Lilypond. Maybe a good moment to jump in, and I think they can use some man power!

See for example these threads:
http://www.nabble.com/guitar-tab-featur ... 95370.html

and from a thread called 'Bends' on the Lilypond user mailinglist:

You have two important
prerequisites:

1) You're interested in having a particular feature in LilyPond (this is by
far the most important)
2) You have some background in programming.

You can see the Contributors' Guide for some detailed information about
participating:

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.13/Documenta ... ndex#index

My recommendation is that you spend a bit of time getting familiar with
LilyPond. You should get the source, and hunt around in the source to see
where graphic items (grobs) are created. The C++ code is fairly hard to
read if you insist on knowing the details, but if you just pretend it works
and don't try to understand exactly how each line works until you need to,
it's not so bad.

Much of the alterable output is in Scheme, so you'll need to understand a
bit about Scheme. Actually, it's in Guile, which is a specific
implementation of Scheme. You can find the Guile Reference Manual online:

http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/manua ... index.html