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LilyPond uses the character repertoire defined by the Unicode consortium and ISO/IEC 10646. This defines a unique name and code point for the character sets used in virtually all modern languages and many others too. Unicode can be implemented using several different encodings. LilyPond uses the UTF-8 encoding (UTF stands for Unicode Transformation Format) which represents all common Latin characters in one byte, and represents other characters using a variable length format of up to four bytes.
The actual appearance of the characters is determined by the glyphs defined in the particular fonts available - a font defines the mapping of a subset of the Unicode code points to glyphs. LilyPond uses the Pango library to layout and render multi-lingual texts.
Lilypond does not perform any input-encoding conversions. This means that any text, be it title, lyric text, or musical instruction containing non-ASCII characters, must be encoded in UTF-8. The easiest way to enter such text is by using a Unicode-aware editor and saving the file with UTF-8 encoding. Most popular modern editors have UTF-8 support, for example, vim, Emacs, jEdit, and GEdit do. All MS Windows systems later than NT use Unicode as their native character encoding, so even Notepad can edit and save a file in UTF-8 format. A more functional alternative for Windows is BabelPad.
If a LilyPond input file containing a non-ASCII character is not saved in UTF-8 format the error message
FT_Get_Glyph_Name () error: invalid argument
will be generated.
Here is an example showing Cyrillic, Hebrew and Portuguese text:
To enter a single character for which the Unicode escape sequence is known but which is not available in the editor being used, enter
#(ly:export (ly:wide-char->utf-8 #x03BE))
where in this example x03BE
is the hexadecimal code for the
Unicode U+03BE character, which has the Unicode name “Greek Small
Letter Xi”. Any Unicode hexadecimal code may be substituted, and
if all special characters are entered in this format it is not
necessary to save the input file in UTF-8 format.
The ly:export
format may be used in text within \mark
or
\markup
commands but not in lyrics.
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