LilyPond Contributor's Guide: 4.6.2 Generating documentation

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4.6.2 Generating documentation

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Documentation editor’s edit/compile cycle

Initial documentation build:

make [-jX]
make [-jX CPU_COUNT=X] doc          ## can take an hour or more
make [-jX CPU_COUNT=X] doc-stage-1  ## to build only PDF documentation

Edit/compile cycle:

## edit source files, then…

make [-jX]                  ## needed if editing outside
                            ##   Documentation/, but useful anyway
                            ##   for finding Texinfo errors.
make [-jX CPU_COUNT=X] doc  ## usually faster than initial build.

Reset:
It is generally possible to remove the compiled documentation from your system with ‘make doc-clean’, but this method is not 100% guaranteed. Instead, if you want to be sure you have a clean system, we recommend that you delete your ‘build/’ directory, and begin compiling from scratch. Since the documentation compile takes much longer than the non-documentation compile, this does not increase the overall time by a great deal.

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Building documentation

After a successful compile (using make), the documentation can be built by issuing:

make doc

or, to build only the PDF documentation and not the HTML,

make doc-stage-1

Note: The first time you run make doc, the process can easily take an hour or more with not much output on the command line.

After this initial build, make doc only makes changes to the documentation where needed, so it may only take a minute or two to test changes if the documentation is already built.

If make doc succeeds, the HTML documentation tree is available in ‘out-www/offline-root/’, and can be browsed locally. Various portions of the documentation can be found by looking in ‘out/’ and ‘out-www’ subdirectories in other places in the source tree, but these are only portions of the docs. Please do not complain about anything which is broken in those places; the only complete set of documentation is in ‘out-www/offline-root/’ from the top of the source tree.

make doc sends the output from most of the compilation to logfiles. If the build fails for any reason, it should prompt you with the name of a logfile which will provide information to help you work out why the build failed. These logfiles are not deleted with make doc-clean. To remove all the logfiles generated by the compilation process, use:

make log-clean

make doc compiles the documents for all languages. To save some compile time, the English language documents can be compiled on their own with:

make LANGS='' doc

Similarly, it is possible to compile a subset of the translated documentation by specifying their language codes on the command line. For example, the French and German translations are compiled with:

make LANGS='de fr' doc

Note that this will also compile the English version.

Compilation of documentation in Info format with images can be done separately by issuing:

make info

An issue when switching branches between master and translation is the appearance/disappearance of translated versions of some manuals. If you see such a warning from make:

No rule to make target `X', needed by `Y'

Your best bet is to delete the file Y.dep and to try again.

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Building a single document

It’s possible to build a single document. For example, to rebuild only ‘contributor.pdf’, do the following:

cd build/
cd Documentation/
touch ../../Documentation/contributor.texi
make out=www out-www/contributor.pdf

If you are only working on a single document, test-building it in this way can give substantial time savings - recreating ‘contributor.pdf’, for example, takes a matter of seconds.

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Saving time with `CPU_COUNT`

The most time consuming task for building the documentation is running LilyPond to build images of music, and there cannot be several simultaneously running lilypond-book instances, so the ‘-j’ make option does not significantly speed up the build process. To help speed it up, the makefile variable ‘CPU_COUNT’ may be set in ‘local.make’ or on the command line to the number of .ly files that LilyPond should process simultaneously, e.g. on a bi-processor or dual core machine:

make -j3 CPU_COUNT=3 doc

The recommended value of ‘CPU_COUNT’ is one plus the number of cores or processors, but it is advisable to set it to a smaller value unless your system has enough RAM to run that many simultaneous LilyPond instances. Also, values for the ‘-j’ option that pose problems with ‘make’ are less likely to pose problems with ‘make doc’ (this applies to both ‘-j’ and ‘CPU_COUNT’). For example, with a quad-core processor, it is possible for ‘make -j5 CPU_COUNT=5 doc’ to work consistently even if ‘make -j5’ rarely succeeds.

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AJAX search

To build the documentation with interactive searching, use:

make doc AJAX_SEARCH=1

This requires PHP, and you must view the docs via a http connection (you cannot view them on your local filesystem).

Note: Due to potential security or load issues, this option is not enabled in the official documentation builds. Enable at your own risk.

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Installing documentation

The HTML, PDF and if available Info files can be installed into the standard documentation path by issuing

make install-doc

This also installs Info documentation with images if the installation prefix is properly set; otherwise, instructions to complete proper installation of Info documentation are printed on standard output.

To install the Info documentation separately, run:

make install-info

Note that to get the images in Info documentation, install-doc target creates symbolic links to HTML and PDF installed documentation tree in ‘prefix/share/info’, in order to save disk space, whereas install-info copies images in ‘prefix/share/info’ subdirectories.

It is possible to build a documentation tree in ‘out-www/online-root/’, with special processing, so it can be used on a website with content negotiation for automatic language selection; this can be achieved by issuing

make WEB_TARGETS=online doc

and both ‘offline’ and ‘online’ targets can be generated by issuing

make WEB_TARGETS="offline online" doc

Several targets are available to clean the documentation build and help with maintaining documentation; an overview of these targets is available with

make help

from every directory in the build tree. Most targets for documentation maintenance are available from ‘Documentation/’; for more information, see Documentation work.

The makefile variable QUIET_BUILD may be set to 1 for a less verbose build output, just like for building the programs.

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Building documentation without compiling

The documentation can be built locally without compiling LilyPond binary, if LilyPond is already installed on your system.

From a fresh Git checkout, do

./autogen.sh   # ignore any warning messages
cp GNUmakefile.in GNUmakefile
make -C scripts && make -C python
nice make LILYPOND_EXTERNAL_BINARY=/path/to/bin/lilypond doc

Please note that this may break sometimes – for example, if a new feature is added with a test file in input/regression, even the latest development release of LilyPond will fail to build the docs.

You may build the manual without building all the ‘input/*’ stuff (i.e. mostly regression tests): change directory, for example to ‘Documentation/’, issue make doc, which will build documentation in a subdirectory ‘out-www’ from the source files in current directory. In this case, if you also want to browse the documentation in its post-processed form, change back to top directory and issue

make out=www WWW-post

Known issues and warnings

You may also need to create a script for pngtopnm and pnmtopng. On GNU/Linux, I use this:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib
exec /usr/bin/pngtopnm "$@"

On MacOS X with fink, I use this:

export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/sw/lib
exec /sw/bin/pngtopnm "$@"

On MacOS X with macports, you should use this:

export DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/local/lib
exec /opt/local/bin/pngtopnm "$@"

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