LilyPond 2.26.0 released [LWN.net]

Version 2.26.0 of the LilyPond music-engraving program has been released. Major changes include the ability to use the Cairo library to generate output and improvements in spacing between clefs and time signatures. See the release notes for a full list of miscellaneous improvements as well as what's new with musical and specialist notation.

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Pleased to see Lilypond on LWN!

Posted Apr 23, 2026 8:04 UTC (Thu) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (2 responses)

Lilypond is a gem, I use it to prepare sheet music for my son (he likes soundtracks but it's hard to find arrangements that are suitable for a 11 year old player!)

For those that like videos, here is one that introduces it.

Pleased to see Lilypond on LWN!

Posted Apr 25, 2026 22:08 UTC (Sat) by songmaster (subscriber, #1748) [Link] (1 responses)

Here here!

I believe Wol is also a user. The output from Lilypond is so much nicer and more readable in performance than most non-commercial sheet music that I’ve sung from.

Pleased to see Lilypond on LWN!

Posted Apr 26, 2026 10:09 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I believe Wol is also a user.

Very much so. The music is so much nicer to read when playing than much that is out there.

And as a trombonist it's also great for producing music in whatever clef is appropriate to the circumstances - trombones play in three different clefs and two transpositions as a matter of course. A lot of old music - written for Brass or "Reed and Wind" bands is in tenor clef, orchestras play in bass, and modern brass bands are treble transposed a ninth into Bb. Lilypond is brilliant in just chucking out parts in whatever arrangement I want. I've heard a few horror stories about big commercial software that defaults to all sorts of weird transposition settings ...

Cheers,
Wol