LilyKDE

This is a Free Software project to make working with the LilyPond music typesetter within KDE very easy. If you are a LilyPond user and you have KDE, then LilyKDE is for you.

The main part of LilyKDE is a plugin for Kate, with the following features:

• Run LilyPond on the current document with a keystroke.
• Show an embedded PDF preview. When you click on a note or another object, Kate jumps to the correct document and cursor position.
• Display LilyPond's messages in a log view. Error messages are also clickable.
• Direct MIDI input from a MIDI-keyboard or even your computer keyboard. This powerful function uses Rumor for the actual work, but it can automatically set the key and time signature according to the current document. You can adjust the metronome speed very easy by clicking on a "Tap" button. Many other settings are available.
• After LilyPond has run you can open, email or print PDF documents and play MIDI files with a mouseclick from within Kate.
• Automatic hyphenation of Lyric texts using dictionaries from e.g. OpenOffice.org or Scribus.

The other parts of LilyKDE are:

• MIME type information and an icon for LilyPond files
• A textedit:// service to make the clickable links work anywhere in KDE
• A Konqueror servicemenu and helper app to run LilyPond from within Konqueror on selected files
• Katepart syntax highlighting for LilyPond documents (also part of KDE)

LilyKDE is translated into Dutch, French, Turkish and Spanish.

Screenshots:

How to Install

Install Kate and KPDF (from KDE 3.5.x), Python, PyQt, PyKDE, Pâté, Rumor (optional), and of course LilyPond. If possible use the tools of your operating system to install these prerequisites. (If the Pate site is unavailable, you can get Pate-0.5.1 here.)

Then unpack lilykde and type make install. This installs LilyKDE in your home directory. You may look at the README and INSTALL files for other install options.

Next launch Kate and enable the Pate plugin, which enables Kate to use Python plugins. With Pate enabled, select Settings->Configure Python Plugins and enable LilyPond. Click on the Configure tab to see if you need to adjust some commands. The defaults should "just work", however. A command is marked red if it can't be found.

Now, when editing a LilyPond file, press Ctrl+Shift+M to get a preview (with clickable notes), or Ctrl+Shift+P to get a publishable PDF (without clickable notes but much smaller). When you right-click one or more LilyPond files in Konqueror you see an action Convert to PDF, which runs LilyPond on the selected files, displaying a log with clickable error messages (if there were any).

LilyKDE tips

How to show the PDF preview: Run LilyPond once or open a document that has an updated PDF in the same directory.

How to show or hide the PDF preview page list: The PDF preview is an embedded KPDF. If you want to hide/show the page list in the PDF preview, give the preview keyboard focus by hiding and then showing it. Now you can press Ctrl+L to hide or show the page list within the preview. You can zoom the preview by dragging the middle mouse button.

How to quickly get a PNG of a LilyPond snippet: Awaiting an automatic PNG generation feature, you can right-drag on the PDF preview and copy a graphic to the clipboard. Then paste it e.g. in KMail and give it a name (with png extension), and it will automatically attached to an email.

Use the Expand Pate plugin: type satb and then Ctrl+Space. This gives you a complete choir setup. You can add other templates using the Expand configuration dialog. When you update LilyKDE, you should save a copy of the x-lilypond.conf in the expand directory if you added any local changes.

Smart use of include files (0.5.3 and higher): When you are working on a file that just contains music definitions, while another file contains the full score setup, you can put a specially formatted variable in a LilyPond comment to let LilyKDE compile the other file. You can set this separately for preview mode and publish mode. More info here.

How to help

Contributions, like code, icons or translations are very welcome. If you find bugs, please report them in the issue tracker on this site.

Using the sourcecode from SVN

Normally you would just download and install the latest release (see Downloads tab), but if you want to live at the bleeding edge, you can get LilyKDE directly from svn. Install subversion if necessary and then type:

svn checkout http://lilykde.googlecode.com/svn/trunk lilykde
cd lilykde
make
make install

You need GNU gettext to build the translations if you use the SVN sourcecode.

If you want keep your copy of the source up-to-date, type

svn update

from within the lilykde directory.