Footnotes

[Mats Bengtsson]

Some year ago, we had a discussion about footnotes in LilyPond.
Basically, if you say c^"\\footnote{A comment}", you will get a
footnote mark above the music but that actual footnote is never printed.

I just made a small investigation and the problem turns out to be that
footnotes in general don't work in the argument of almost any (La)TeX
command. In particular, it doesn't work within \hbox{...}, which is what
Lily uses to typeset the scores.

I found one useful solution, namely to use the package footnote.sty
(see 'texdoc footnote'). Basically, if you use lilypond-book, it is just
to say

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{footnote}

\begin{document}
\renewcommand{\preLilyPondExample}{\savenotes}
\renewcommand{\postLilyPondExample}{\spewnotes}
...
\end{document}

If you have a musical example in your document that spans several
pages, this solution will typeset all the footnotes on the last
page of the example, but that should be easy to overcome by
redefining \interscoreline to include a \spewnotes\savenotes
at the end of each score line.

This solution should be more convenient than that proposed by
Laura Conrad in 
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2002-12/msg00210.html
and might even be something we could include by default in the
lilypond(ly2dvi) script.

   Mats