Many people don't realize that GSview can be used to view PDF files as well as PostScript files --- and you don't experience the font problem that people have been encountering when viewing lilypond's .ps output.
Another advantage of GSview is that each time you make GSview the active window, it checks to see if the file has changed -- and if so, it reloads it (while also trying to preserve the point at which you are viewing it). This means that, *in principle*, you can run lilypond while keeping the pdf output open in GSview; then see the results immediately (similar to the way xdvi works with LaTeX on a Unix/Linux system). However, if you try this, you get an error because part of the lilypond process is to delete the .pdf file before replacing it with a new one -- and that can't be done while the file is open. But there is a way to work around this: write a .bat file that processes the .ly file under a different name, then copies the .pdf file to the original name. Here is the one I wrote; it takes the base name (without the ".ly" extension of the source file as its only argument. This is specific to my installation (e.g. it specifies an include directory) but it is easily modified. ----- File LlyPd.BAT ----- @echo off rem This script allows compilation of a LilyPond file while the rem target PDF file is still open in GSview -- a situation rem produces an error with the ordinary lilypond command. rem Usage: llypd basename rem (DON'T include the extension ".ly") copy /Y %1.ly 00temp00.ly c:\progra~1\lilypond\usr\bin\lilypond -Ic:/work/music/include 00temp00.ly rem If it was successful enough to produce a pdf file, copy it over rem and delete the temp file(s) produced if not exist 00temp00.pdf goto finish copy /Y 00temp00.pdf %1.pdf del 00temp00.ps del 00temp00.pdf :finish del 00temp00.ly ----- end of file ----- A more refined way to write this would be to use the -o or --output option; however, this option does not seem to work correctly with my current installation (version 2.9.12 for Windows XP). I don't know if a similar method works for the gui version (lilypond-windows). I use the command-line version because I can add it to the Tools menu of my text editor (TextPad) and capture the output in another TextPad window. I recommend TextPad for Windows users who do a lot of programming (including things like LilyPond and LaTeX). Russ _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
