Re: Adding / deleting staves on the fly

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi Risto, [by the way... "Risto" is the middle name given to me by my  
Serbian mother!!  =)  ]

> I've been trying to find out how to create and delete staves on the  
> fly.
> This would be very useful especially in choir music when one voice  
> is quiet
> for a long time or when a voice is divided and it is no longer  
> convenient to
> cram them into one staff.

I've been composing and engraving a lot of choral scores lately, and  
(naturally) have run into the same issues... The situation (at least  
for me) isn't as simple as being able to create and delete staves on  
the fly: such a solution requires way too many manual adjustments for  
different editions (or anytime the page layout changes).

Short of Lilypond gaining *serious* artificial intelligence  
capabilities...  ;-)

I have come to the conclusion that the best situation would be as  
follows:
    1. Encode ALL POSSIBLE staff situations (e.g., 4-staff S+A+T+B,  
3-staff SA+TB, and 1-staff SATB);
    2. Provide a "rating" for each measure (or section), ranking the  
layouts from "most desirable" to "least desirable" (or perhaps  
"necessary" to "fallback"?); and then
    3. Have Lilypond decide which layout to select, once horizontal  
layout has been determined.

I took a (brief) stab at trying to do this using #'tag, but (AFAICS)  
what I'm looking for is way beyond the capability of that mechanism.

Dev Team:
    1. Does this idea make any sense?
    2. Is it technically feasible to do this?
    3. How gigantic a job [and, thus, how expensive a sponsorship]  
would it be?

Thanks!
Kieren.