Talk:What is LilyPond?

From LilyPond Wiki

The bullet point about WYSIWYG is confusing; it conflates two issues, and is also a bit negative.

It is not a commercial WYSIWYG 'music processor' like Sib., Finale, Igor or Capella. These emulate modern WYSIWYG word processors in trying to show immediately visually what will be produced when the document is printed.

This means:

• they use a lot of their code to emulate approximately how the music will appear on the screen.
• they also have to try and provide a GUI (Graphical User Interface) to allow you to manipulate the music visually.
• they need to keep formatting information in proprietary, almost always incompatible formats.

We need to say that Lilypond uses a different approach:

• it uses plain text files as its source.
• it compiles the source files to produce the printable, engraved music.
• this approach emulates older word processors and HTML which separate the process of entering the document/web page content from that of rendering and formatting it.
• you can produce quality engraved music using a plain text editor.
• you can use it on different Operating Systems (Windows, Max OS/X, Linux and other Unix varieties).