HOWTO: lilypond-1.3.98 on win32

[James Hammons]

OK, I've gotten 1.3.98 to work (windows version--finally!) without cygwin
and with properly defined environmental variables.  For anyone who wants to
use lily on a windows box but *without* having to install Cygwin and all its
ugliness, here's what you need to do:

1. Download & install Python and MiKTeX and, if you want useful output,
Ghostscript & Ghostview.

2. Download the latest Win32 distribution of Lilypond and unzip it
somewhere; also download cygwin1.dll.zip and guile-1.4-i686-cygwin.bin.zip.

3. Create a subdirectory where you want lily to live (usually a name with a
version number is helpful if you follow the development versions).

4. Copy all the files/directories in the lilypond-1.n.m directory (usually
three levels deep from the top level directory) from where you originally
unzipped lilypond to your new subdirectory.

5. Unzip guile-1.4-i686-cygwin.bin.zip somewhere.  Copy the ice-9
*directory* (usually five levels deep from the top level directory) to
your-new-lily-directory\share\lilypond where your-new-lily-directory is your
new subdirectory.

6. Unzip cygwin1.dll.zip in your-new-lily-directory\bin.

7. Create a file called 'ly2dvi.bat' in your-new-lily-directory\bin that
contains the following lines:

@echo off
"c:\foo\python.exe" "c:\bar\ly2dvi.py" %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

Note that you have to replace "c:\foo" with the path to where "python.exe"
lives and "c:\bar" with the path to where "ly2dvi.py" lives.  If either path
has spaces in it (such as c:\program files\python\python.exe) you will need
to enclose it in double quotes (as shown above).

8. Find a copy "ash.exe" and put it in your-new-lily-directory\bin.  You can
get it as part of the latest development version of lilypond by Jeff Reed at
home.austin.rr.com/jbr/jeff/lilypond (the hard way) or get it from Cygnus at
sources.redhat.com/cygwin (still hard, but you can exclude a lot of
extraneous stuff from your download).

9. Create a subdirectory where you want to keep your music and work from.
Create a file called lily.bat that contains the following lines:

@echo off
set OS=Windows_95
set LILYPONDHOME=c:\foo
set GUILE_LOAD_PATH=//c/foo/share/lilypond
set LILYPONDPREFIX=//c/foo/share/lilypond
set LILYPONDPREFIX_DOS=c:\foo\share\lilypond
set path="%LILYPONDHOME%"\bin;c:\texmf\miktex\bin;%path%
set TEXINPUTS=%LILYPONDPREFIX_DOS%\tex;%LILYPONDPREFIX_DOS%\ps;;
set MFINPUTS=%LILYPONDPREFIX_DOS%\mf;;
set LILYPOND=%LILYPONDHOME%\share\lilypond
set MIKTEX=c:\texmf
set TFMFONTS=:%MIKTEX%\fonts\tfm\public\cm:%LILYPOND%\tfm

Note that you will have to replace "c:\foo" and "c/foo" with the path up to
and including "your-new-lily-directory".  Note the direction of the slashes
in the various paths, they are important!  Also, you may have to change the
path to your MiKTeX "bin" directory in the "set path=" line as well as the
path to the base MiKTeX install in the "set MIKTEX=" line.

Now you should be set up to run lily.  To test your setup open a dos box in
windows and run lily.bat.  Change to a directory with .ly files in it (if
there are none in the current directory).  Type the following:

ly2dvi -P name-of-some-lilypond-ly-file

and see if you get a .ps file to look at.  If not, then make sure you have
the latest cygwin1.dll in your-new-lily-directory\bin, make sure all paths
are set correctly, make sure all environmental variables are set correctly.
If that still doesn't work, ask around for some help.  It may not ever work,
but then that's the price you pay for trying to get a unix program to work
in a windows environment!

-- Shamus

BTW, Jan:  Is it possible for you to set your cross compile target to i386
instead of i686 (or at least, i586)?  I think that's the source of the
troubles I was having with my machine at home...