efficient score and part production

[Paul Scott]

I have posted variations of this before and I am at least curious what 
some of you do to save work here.  My questions about "Frenched staves" 
are just a subset of what I try to do to make my work easier *and* more 
accurate.  Multi-measure rests are also related here.  As a professional 
copyist before easily available computers I was well respected by my 
composer clients for producing parts with almost no errors.  As a 
professional programmer I am very experienced with ways to make my work 
more efficient and am eager to apply my thoughts to the music I copy 
with Lily.

Whenever I am copying two or more parts for the same music whether they 
are in the same score or separate parts I write a global (I once thought 
the global I saw in earlier docs was a special word in Lily) definition 
which gives me at least the time form of the music, for example:

global = { time 3/4 \skip 4*3*32 \mark "A"
               \repeat volta 2 { \skip 4*3*32 } }

That means I only have to type all of that information once no matter 
how may parts/voices there are.  It also means once I get the "global" 
right I don't to worry about mistakes like leaving out bars, etc. out of 
individual parts.  I realize that producing the full score first as a 
composer would do eliminates some of that kind of error if the part 
extraction is done correctly.  OTOH it doesn't eliminate some of the 
redundant typing.  And now how easy is it to produce the individual 
parts?  Because of its structure Lily certainly does help a lot here.  
But then there is all the other markup etc. that needs to appear at 
least at the top of the score and also in each of the individual parts.

Using this technique works pretty well until a particular voice/part has 
a long multimeasure rest and then combining \global with 
\RemoveEmptyStaffContext breaks down which is why I posted about 
"Frenched parts."  But as you can see this is also a general efficiency 
question.

I have been involved in a couple of threads on these pointing out that 
there were not yet solutions to these common situations.  What do you 
composers do about these structure and efficiency situations?  Am I 
missing some basic LilyPond techniques?

No criticism intended here just possible ideas.  I think Lily is great!

Thanks,

Paul Scott