[1] Macros for typesetting music in TeX first appeared in 1987 (MuTeX) and were limited to one-staff systems.

In 1991, Daniel Taupin[2] created MusicTeX, whose macros allowed the production of systems with multiple staves, but which presented a few problems in controlling the horizontal positioning of notes.

In 1997 the positioning problems were corrected in MusiXTeX, which includes the external application musixflx to control the horizontal distances.

When compiling a TeX source file named file.tex, a file.mx1 is generated, containing information about the distances between staves and bar lengths.

In 1996, Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen, who were working in the MusiXTeX PreProcessor (MPP) project since the previous year, decided to create a new music engraving program loosely based on MusiXTeX's concepts, named LilyPond.