Hi Urs (et al.),
a)
Do you want LilyPond to achieve the results of the benchmark tests by
'automatic engraving', i.e. only with general overrides and settings? Or will
you accept local tweaks too?
I envision an ongoing iteration of two stylesheet sets and a tweaks file:
1. Lilypond "House Style". This set of stylesheets will get us as close as
possible to our benchmark(s) with no local tweaks. In a perfect world, these are
distributed with the application source/binary. These would be the stylesheets against
which revisions would be tested, features suggested and introduced, etc.
2. Henle (or Barenreiter or Peters or…) "House Style". This will change global settings (like
fonts, spacing, etc.) to make our default output "virtually identical" to the original model(s),
without resorting to "composition-specific tweaks".
3. Specific "edition file". This would be a file accompanying the "_notes.ily" file for a
particular piece (e.g., Beethoven Op 10 No 3), with appropriate editorial markings, manual/local tweaks, etc., that
would take #2's "virtually identical" and turn it into "indistinguishable".
I intend to spend at least 75% of my time on #1, at least 24% of my time on #2,
and only if I happen to get to #3 will I put remaining ergs into it.
b)
When comparing to the benchmark scores do you want the LilyPond scores look
exactly like their models or 'as good as' their models?
#1 should make it look "as good as".
#2 should make it look "almost exactly like".
#3 would make it look "exactly like".
Does that make sense?
In addition to these questions I have a suggestion: If you are going to have a
set of multiple style sheets and example scores I'd highly recommend to put it
into a Git repository which allows others to contribute through pull requests.
I repeat my offer to do this in the context of openlilylib.org where it would
be a good fit. We could host everything there which doesn't directly go into
LilyPond proper.
This could also a good place to present the results.
I'm happy to keep working on these stylesheets in that way, as long as someone
else administers this (including hand-holding me through the process of setting
up Git).