[Tex/LaTex] Set music in LaTeX with ABC or LilyPond

lilypondmusic

I’ll give a tutorial, “LaTeX for musicians”, in the next year and certainly I want the to show how to include music in their texts. I’m a musician myself but I never used LaTeX to typeset music.

I found two ways to include music in a LaTeX document (plus: integrate music as image) and I want to share my thoughts and ask for some help (see below). First, let's take a more detailed look at both ways:

ABC

Code

% file abc.tex
\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{abc}

\begin{document}
Text
\begin{abc}[name=c-dur]
X: 1 % start of header
K: C % scale: C major
"Text"C4 G4 | (3FED c4 G2 |
\end{abc}
\end{document}

Compile

pdflatex --shell-escape abc.tex

Output

ABC output

LilyPond

Code

% file lp.lytex
\documentclass{scrartcl}

\begin{document}
Text
\begin[staffsize=12]{lilypond}
\relative c' {
  c2^"Text" g'2 \times 2/3 { f8 e d } c'2 g4
}
\end{lilypond}
\end{document}

Compile

lilypond-book --output=out-dir --pdf lp.lytex
cd out-dir
pdflatex lp.tex

Output

LilyPond output

Comparison

Now let’s talk about the pros and cons.

The ABC workflow is much easier than the one of LilyPond and it simply needs a call of pdflatex. For this it’s preferable for the students of the tutorial since most of them aren't computer geeks.
The ABC syntax seems to bee easier at a first glance.
LilyPond uses the right font i.e. the font of the LaTeX document.
abc.sty always produces a display style image, i.e., it starts a new line and centers it’s content. Furthermore there seems to be now option to shorten the line that they fit just the typed notes and not span the whole \linewidth (workaround: set width=0.5\abcwidth).
As far as I can see LilyPond is more flexible in the number of ways to typeset music (inline, display style, …) and the possibilities of typesetting in general.
The LilyPond music font looks better except the fat bar lines.

Questions

^{The numbers are not to give an order. I numbered the questions to make it easy to answer the …}

Which way would you prefer to use? Which one do you suggest for students how a not very good in using computers?
I wonder if it will be possible to create a package that integrates LilyPond in the same way that abc.sty does width ABC notation
Can one change the font of the ABC output so that it matches the LaTeX main font?
Is there a way to make ABC find a good line length for the given number of notes?
Can one change the width of LilyPonds bar lines?

Conclusion

I’d prefer to use (and teach) the LilyPond way but I fear the compilation workflow would scare the students. So if question 2 could be solved it would be great 🙂

_{I hope you understand what I want since my english may be not the best. Please ask if something is not clear …}

Best Answer

It's not possible to use the same font as the document with ABC, for inherent limitations of the abcm2ps program. However, it's quite a long time since I don't update it and things might have changed (I'll take a look).

It should be easy to add "inline" versions of the music snippet inclusion, which is not there because the package was intended for inclusion of complete tunes.

Integration with LilyPond in the same way is not as easy. I have some "kind-of-working" code. A major hindrance is the difficulty of passing LilyPond parameters and directives from the TeX side (with lilypond-book it's the other way around).

Since there seems to be interest in this topic, I'll try and develop the code. For now, the following code

\begin{filecontents*}{testlily.ly}
\version "2.13.38" 

\include "config.ly" 

\relative c'' { 
c d e c 
}
\end{filecontents*}
\begin{filecontents*}{testlily3.ly}
\version "2.13.38" 

\include "config.ly" 

\relative c' {
  c2^"Text" g'2 \times 2/3 { f8 e d } c'2 g4
}

\end{filecontents*}
\documentclass[draft]{article} 
\usepackage[final]{graphicx} 
\usepackage[MacOSX,between-system-space=3]{lilypond} 
\usepackage{lipsum} 
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}

Test: integrating \LaTeX{} and LilyPond. 

\lilypondfile{testlily} 

Not too bad, isn't it? 

\lipsum[2] 

\lilypondfile{testlily3} 

\end{document}

will produce the following output:

enter image description here

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Lilypond generated with MuseScore does not fit the width of the page in XeTeX doc

lilypond-book is just a complicated way of producing cropped PDF images of each of your examples and then automatically including them in a LaTeX file.

You can do the same thing by hand, in my opinion much more simply, by using the EPS backend of lilypond to produce an image cropped to the size of the music.

Then the only real LaTeX component is to include the PDF images using the graphicx package. The main point is that you can set the width of the image in the lilypond source and then just include it at its natural size in the LaTeX document.

In the example below, you can \include the example.ly file in all your music example .ly source files, and when compiled they will produce cropped PDFs.

Three files for this example:

1. example.ly -- Page layout for cropped musical examples in lilypond
1. score.ly -- Your musical example, which \includes the page layout commands from example.ly
1. analysis.tex -- Sample TeX file showing how the image is included.

FILE 1, example.ly

% STYLE SHEET FOR IN-TEXT EXAMPLES

\version "2.18.2"

#( ly:set-option 'backend 'eps )

\paper{
  indent = 0.75\in
  line-width = 6.5\in
    top-margin = 1\in
    bottom-margin = 2\in
    ragged-bottom = ##t
    ragged-last-bottom = ##t
  oddFooterMarkup=##f
  oddHeaderMarkup=##f
  bookTitleMarkup = ##f
  scoreTitleMarkup = ##f
}

FILE 2 -- score.ly

\version "2.18.2"
\include "example.ly"

Music = { 
    \clef "tenor"
    \time 3/4
    c4 d4 e4 |
    f2 g4~ |
    g4 a2 |
    b2. |
    c'2. |
    \bar "||"
}

\score{
    <<
        \new Staff { \Music }
    >>
    \layout {}
}

FILE 3 - analysis.tex

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[letterpaper,margin=1in]{geometry}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}

\section{Music Example}

\lipsum[1]
See example~\ref{fig:score1}.

%*******************
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics{score}\centering
\caption{Score example 1}
\label{fig:score1}
\end{figure}
%*******************

\lipsum[2]


\end{document}

enter image description here

[Tex/LaTex] How to easily include .ly files in a .tex document

As mentionned by touhami, the solution is to use the \lilypondfile[options]{myFile.ly} command. Available options are detailed in the lilypond online documentation.

Below is the workflow to compile your document:

The document

\documentclass{scrbook}
    [...]
\begin{document}

    Some regular text.

    \lilypondfile[noindent,quote]{myFile.ly}

\end{document}

Important: You have to save this file as filename.lytex and not as a .tex file.

The myFile.ly is a normal lylipond-file.

Compiling

(I give here my ready-to-go compiling work-flow. Of course, you need to adapt it to your needs.)

Working directory

In your working directory, you need:

Your filename.lytex file (see over),
The myFile.ly file you're calling in your .lytex file
A folder called LilyPondPrecompile

Commands

Via your terminal, go to your working directory. Then :

Pre-compiling with lilypond-book (i.e. from .lytex to .tex)
```
$ lilypond-book --pdf --format=latex --output=LilyPondPrecompile filename.lytex
```
(Note that if you call your .ly file or other .tex files that are located in your workingDirectory/part sub-folder, you have to pass this argument into previous command line: --include=part)
Move into your LilyPondPrecompile subfolder

Previous step generated a .tex file out of the .lytex one. To keep folders clean, we decided to put the result (i.e. produced files) of this pre-compiling into a sub-folder (that what --output=LilyPondPrecompile stands for). We now have to change our working directory to compile the .tex file.
```
$ cd LilyPondPrecompile/
```
Compile the .tex file (i.e. from .tex to .pdf)
```
$ pdflatex filename.tex
```
Repeate this step if needed. (Note that calling pdflatex LilyPondPrecompile/filename.tex from your original working directory seems not to work).

Your done!

ABC