Installation

Abjad 1.1.x requires Python 2.5 or 2.6 and LilyPond 12.2 or newer to run. The sections below explain how to install Python, LilyPond and Abjad.

Install Python 2.5 or 2.6

You may already have Python installed on your computer. Type python at the commandline to find out.

$ python

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Feb  6 2009, 19:02:12)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

If Python starts, then you already have Python installed.

If Python does not start, or if you have Python 2.4 or earlier, download from http://www.python.org. Make sure to add Python to your PATH environment variable after install. [1]

Install LilyPond 2.12 or newer

Abjad requires LilyPond 2.12 or newer. To see if LilyPond is already installed on your system, type lilypond --help at the commandline.

lilypond --help

Usage: lilypond [OPTION]... FILE...

Typeset music and/or produce MIDI from FILE.

LilyPond produces beautiful music notation ...

If LilyPond starts then you already have LilyPond installed on your system.

If LilyPond does not start, download from http://www.lilypond.org. Make sure to add LilyPond to your PATH after install.

Install Abjad 1.1.x

It is easy to install Abjad with the Python setuptools utility.

easy_install -U abjad

If you do not have setuptools installed on your computer, just follow the steps outlined below.

  1. Download the latest release from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Abjad.

  2. Untar the downloaded file.

    tar xzvf Abjad-1.1.x.tar.gz

    The sequence 1.1.x should be the version number of the latest release of Abjad.

  3. Change into the directory created in step 2.

    cd Abjad-1.1.x
  4. If you’re using Linux [2] or MacOS [3] you can use Python to install.

    sudo python setup.py install
  5. If you’re using Windows, start up a command shell with administrator privileges and then use setup.py to install.

    setup.py install

These commands install Abjad in your Python site-packages directory.

Notes

[1]You can check and set the value of PATH and other environment variables in many ways. See this Wikipedia entry if you need examples.
[2]Note for Linux users. Abjad makes use of xdg-open to display PDF files using your default PDF viewer. Most Linux distributions now come with xdg-utils installed. If you do not have xdg-utils installed, download it from http://www.portland.freedsektop.org and install. Alternatively you can set the pdfviewer variable in the $HOME/.abjad/config file to your favorite PDF viewer.
[3]Note for OS X users. In order to be able to run Abjad directly from the terminal via the abj command, you may need to add the Python binary installation directory to your PATH. For example, if you have Python 2.6, abj would usually be placed in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/bin/abj. Thus, you would add /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/bin to your PATH.

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