Sunday, February 7, 2010

Integrating Lilypond with more complex LaTeX documents

In a previous post, I described my trials and tribulations in getting the Lilypond music-engraving package to work with TeXShop, a Mac-based front-end for the LaTeX typesetting system. The example used to illustrate the technique was a rather simple document, with no included external images or files.

As I've continued my rediscovery of LaTeX (having first been exposed to it as an undergraduate), I've come to realize that the rather straightforward techniques I had described previously break down when dealing with more complex documents.  This first came to light when I attempted to incorporate Lilypond content into a LaTeX document built with the Tufte-LaTeX classes, a collection of layout classes created to render LaTeX documents using the design principals of Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and one of the worlds foremost experts on the presentation of information. A self-documenting example of the output of the Tufte-LaTeX book class can be seen here.