Re: Help getting started

[Joe Neeman]

> I don't think it's possible to use lilypond without lots of painful 
> research.  I haven't been able to find an index, or google search that 
> will reliably return simple information.

In my opinion, the most important piece of missing documentation is one 
that describes the basic syntactic and grammatic structure of lilypond. 
I have learned quite a lot by following examples, but I still don't 
really understand what lots of things do. Whenever anyone learns a 
language like C, there are lots of documents/text books that say things 
like: "this is an expression", "this is the structure of a funcion 
call", "this is how to write a function declaration", etc. In lilypond, 
all the examples say is: "this is how to change the stem width". They 
don't say "this is the general format for changing an engraving 
property" or "this is how the \score block is structured".

If anyone else is interested, I think we should try to write a 
comprehensive guide to the stucture of the lilypond language. I'd do it 
myself, but I don't know most of the answers...