These are the engraving source files used to create the Chopin Preludes, opus 28.
This sheet music is created using the LilyPond engraving software. There are two basic types of files: ones that you execute directly using the lilypond command, and those that are included in other files. Any file that ends in .ly produces output (a PDF by default). Included files end in .ily (this is just a convention) and are found in the includes directory.
All of the music of the individual preludes are found in includes/prelude-op28-no[prelude-number]-parts.ily. So for instance, the music for the first prelude is in includes/prelude-op28-no1-parts.ily.
The file header-paper.ily contains the headers, and the global paper, layout, and midi blocks. The file global-variables.ily contains global Scheme functions, redefinitions, and markup variables. The title-page.ily contains the markup for a very simple title page for the preludes.
(I highly recommend the Frescobaldi IDE for LilyPond. It makes all of the following much easier.)
The complete book of all preludes can be created by issuing the following command in the directory this file is in (assuming you have lilypond in your PATH variable):
lilypond preludes-op28-book.ly
To create a smaller PDF, try:
lilypond -dno-point-and-click preludes-op28-book.ly
Each separate prelude has its own LilyPond file in the format prelude-op28-no[prelude-number]-stand-alone.ly. So for instance:
lilypond prelude-op28-no1-stand-alone.ly
You may also download the latest release here to get the compiled PDFs and MIDI files.
preludes-op28-book.ly is set up so that you can print it on two sides of the paper and leave an extra margin amount on the inside pages for binding. If you don't want this, change includes\header-paper.ily and set two-sided = ##f. Similarly, the "stand-alone" peices have two-sided turned off. It this is not the desired behavioir, comment out the two-sided = ##f line.
Issuing the lilypond command will also create MIDI files, but because of the limitations of LilyPond, they are not always that good. They are used mostly for "audial proofreading."
Getting the spacing between preludes is a trade-off between clarity and page breaks. If you want to control the page breaks differently, look in the file preludes-op28-book.ly and add or remove \pageBreak as you like. There are also "forced breaks" in several of the *parts.ily files. These dictate when line breaks (and accasionaly page breaks) should and should not happen.
If you compile the book of preludes, you will probably see some warnings. This is telling you that some of the pages have been compressed to fit your spacing needs. I usually find that a few compressed pages is better than the long, drawn out systems that LilyPond sometimes renders.
You may also see programming errors that are likely caused by this bug and can be ignored.
Thanks to phmcarty for the proofreading.
This work is licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) from Creative Commons. Follow the link for details. Basically, you can use this work however you want if you keep the same license and you attribute the work to me, Knute Snortum (knute (at) snortum (dot) net).