### 1.5 Example applications

We have written LilyPond as an experiment of how to condense the art of music engraving into a computer program. Thanks to all that hard work, the program can now be used to perform useful tasks. The simplest application is printing notes

By adding chord names and lyrics we obtain a lead sheet

Polyphonic notation and piano music can also be printed. The following example combines some more exotic constructs

The fragments shown above have all been written by hand, but that is not a requirement. Since the formatting engine is mostly automatic, it can serve as an output means for other programs that manipulate music. For example, it can also be used to convert databases of musical fragments to images for use on websites and multimedia presentations.

This manual also shows an application: the input format is text, and can therefore be easily embedded in other text-based formats such as LaTeX, HTML or in the case of this manual, Texinfo. By means of a special program, the input fragments can be replaced by music images in the resulting PostScript or HTML output files. This makes it easy to mix music and text in documents.

Read comments on this page, or add one. This page is for LilyPond-2.2.5 (stable-branch).