Can I create music sheets with LaTeX?

Question

If so, how? Do I need any additional software?

Answer 1

I'd instead use LilyPond, which, though not based on TeX at all, has similar goals of human-readable plain-text source files and beautiful, customizable output.

Answer 2

There's also MusiXTeX for the actual typesetting (CTAN). A bit of searching turned up this page about exporting from LilyPond to MusiXTeX.

Answer 3

In addition to MusiXTeX, there's also GregorioTeX for gregorian chant. It's apparently very well suited to typesetting this particular type of scores, and is actively maintained.

Answer 4

Lilypond provides a tool called lilypond-book for creating LaTeX documents with embedded music pieces inside. The embedding works via images, and baselines are not considered. So if you want to display a clef in the middle of a line, it will only be nicely aligned vertically with the rest of the line after you have tweaked its vertical position using additional LaTeX code.

If you don't want to create a document, but rather music sheets on their own, Lilypond wins hands down in user friendliness. I am considered quite unanimously as a TeX wizard and would no longer think of using the TeX-based approaches for typesetting music.

With regard to its implementation: I think Lilypond has always been C++, has gained some Scheme innards rather early, but used TeX as its typesetting backend internally for quite a long time. However, its current mode of operation is to write PostScript files directly as main output (PDF generation works internally by using Ghostscript on those). As a result, utf-8 characters work rather transparently if the font has them. TeX's track record in that area, in comparison, is less than fabulous although in the last years, a few TeX engines (XeTeX, LuaTeX) that can work with larger character sets than 8bit have been developed.

Answer 5

I'd go for Lilypond, myself (see Ben Alpert's answer), but note that there's a TeX FAQ page of discussion about the alternatives