LilyPond Cheatsheet

View Full-Size Image

Short summary on a single page of the most important LilyPond commands for professional music engraving. The Cheat Sheet is written in English, printed in full color and laminated for long durability.

LilyPond is a music engraving program, devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible. It brings the aesthetics of traditionally engraved music to computer printouts. LilyPond is free software and part of the GNU Project.

LilyPond is a compiled system: it is run on a text file describing the music. The resulting output is viewed on-screen or printed. In some ways, LilyPond is more similar to a programming language than graphical score editing software. You do not write music by dragging notes from a graphical toolbar and placing them on a dynamically refreshing score; you write music by typing text. This text is interpreted (or “compiled”) by LilyPond, which produces beautifully engraved sheet music. People accustomed to graphical user interfaces might need to learn a new way of working, but the results are definitely worth it! (Description taken from the LilyPond Homepage)

This approach does not impose any restrictions due to limitations of a GUI (graphical user interface) and thus gives the user greater control over the final looks of a music score. It also allows LilyPond to apply well-established engraphing principles and guidelines automatically without any user intervention to create music scores that look professional from the very beginning without much tweaking.
The downside is that one has the remember the actual text commands - even if they are mostly rather straightforward and clear - to write a musical score. This cheat sheet helps LilyPond users by providing a short summary of all the necessary commands and functionality at a short glance.