For years, LilyPond has been associated with TeX, for its design, syntax and, last but not least, since it used TeX as an output engine. Starting with 2.6, the latter has changed. By default, LilyPond now produces PostScript directly. This makes it easier to install, quicker to operate and more versatile.
Under the hood, this was made possible by use of the Pango library, which does typesetting of multilingual text. This means that you can easily typeset Chinese, Russian or Minoic lyrics. Another result is the SVG output. You can create SVG pictures of music notation directly from LilyPond.
There are also small improvements. This release has numerous extra features, such as color support, string-number notation, arrowed glissandi. Moreover, it is now possible to commission features. For a small fee, we (the core developers) can implement the features that you sorely need. Examples of sponsored features in 2.6 are solfa notation, stemlets, starting and stopping staves.
Han-Wen and Jan
Utrecht/Eindhoven, The Netherlands, May 2005.
This page is for LilyPond-2.6.3 (stable-branch).