Suggestions for writing LilyPond files - GNU LilyPond
Description: GNU LilyPond

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### 4.1 Suggestions for writing LilyPond files

Now you're ready to begin writing larger LilyPond files – not just the little examples in the tutorial, but whole pieces. But how should you go about doing it?

The best answer is “however you want to do it.” As long as LilyPond can understand your files and produces the output that you want, it doesn't matter what your files look like. That said, sometimes we make mistakes when writing files. If LilyPond can't understand your files, or produces output that you don't like, how do you fix the problem?

Here are a few suggestions that can help you to avoid or fix problems:

- Include `\version` numbers in every file. Note that all templates contain a `\version "2.8.0"` string. We highly recommend that you always include the `\version`, no matter how small your file is. Speaking from personal experience, it's quite frustrating to try to remember which version of LilyPond you were using a few years ago. `convert-ly` requires you to declare which version of LilyPond you used.
- Include checks: Bar check and Octave check. If you include checks every so often, then if you make a mistake, you can pinpoint it quicker. How often is “every so often”? It depends on the complexity of the music. For very simple music, perhaps just once or twice. For very complex music, perhaps every bar.
- One bar per line of text. If there is anything complicated, either in the music itself or in the output you desire, it's often good to write only one bar per line. Saving screen space by cramming eight bars per line just isn't worth it if you have to `debug' your files.
- Comment your files. Use either bar numbers (every so often) or references to musical themes (“second theme in violins,” “fourth variation”, etc). You may not need comments when you're writing the piece for the first time, but if you want to go back to change something two or three years later, or if you pass the source over to a friend, it will be much more challenging to determine your intentions or how your file is structured if you didn't comment the file.
- Indent your braces. A lot of problems are caused by an imbalance in the number of `{` and `}`.

This page is for LilyPond-2.8.8 (stable-branch).

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