>> ...it is always possible to process your `.ly` files manually with
>> lilypond to get PDFs, and you include the PDFs with
>> `\includegraphics` into your LaTeX document....
>
> Thanks, Werner. I am able to do that; I printed a document
> including 2 separate Lilypond PDFs with some text in between. I
> think this would work well for projects like a collection of music,
> where each piece begins on its own dedicated page.
>
> I don't know how well this would work if I make a book with a lot of
> short etudes or exercises where there might be more than one file on
> a page (something like Bartok's Mikrokosmos book 1).
>
> Eventually, I would like to print a textbook with a lot of short
> musical examples, so I don't think the PDF route would work for
> that.
Including LilyPond snippets that have been manually converted to PDF
*always* works, regardless of the size or the type of the project –
this is *exactly* what all the additional tools like `lilypond-book`
or `lyluatex` do behind the scene. However, with increasing size of a
project, this can become inconvenient, especially for people not
engrained in programming. For example, you change a note in snippet
325, and you forget to re-generate the PDF...
Of course, there are other 'classical' tools, like setting up a proper
Makefile that automatically re-generates all out-of-date LilyPond PDFs
(you would then simply say `make`, never calling LilyPond or LaTeX
directly). Programmers are used to that, but other people are
probably not enthused to learn how to call `make` and how to create
Makefiles...
The biggest advantage of using `lilypond-book` or `lyluatex` is to
have both the text and the music source code in the same input file.
However, this is just a convenience, it is not a necessity.
Werner
