Using Lilypond to produce publication-ready music

[Mark Engelberg]

For my first outing with Lilypond, I wanted to see whether I could produce sheet
music that fits this publication specification:
http://tinyurl.com/barbershop-notation-manual

Note that this document spells out exactly what is expected for this style of
music, and a full example is given at the end of the document.

The basic SATB template works reasonably well as a starting point.

Here are some of the issues I have faced:

First, the margins need to be bigger.  At least a 1/2-inch top, bottom, left,
and right.  I thought this would be easy to change, and there are in fact
settings for top and bottom and left, but not right.  I tried this in the \paper
block:
  top-margin = 10\mm
  bottom-margin = 10\mm
  left-margin = 16\mm
  #(define line-width (- line-width (* 8 mm)))

which sort of worked but not quite.  It's unclear to me how these margins
interact with other elements (for example, the header and footer, and the
title), and I'm not sure I'm getting the right amount of margin.

Second, a more substantial margin at the top is expected on the first page
(about 2 inches, including the title area), and I don't see any way to tweak
just the first page.  

Third, the font type and size are specified for all textual elements.  For
example, the title should be in 18-point Arial Bold.  The lyrics should be
11-point Times New Roman.  Before tweaking this aspect, I tried to see how
Lilypond would do things by default.  I thought the default Century font on the
lyrics looked too big and more "childish" than the typical Times New Roman.  

So I added:
myStaffSize = #20
  #(define fonts
    (make-pango-font-tree "Times New Roman"
        "Arial"
        "Courier New"
        (/ myStaffSize 20)))
to the \paper block.

Then, I went through and littered the header with markup blocks that specified
font style and size explicitly, for example:

  title = \markup {\sans {\bold \abs-fontsize #18 "YOU'RE THE ONLY GIRL THAT
MADE ME CRY"}}
  subtitle = \markup {\sans {\bold \abs-fontsize #12 "(1920)"}}

When I printed this, I wasn't 100% convinced that I was getting the absolute
point sizes I had requested, but it was pretty close.

Setting the absolute point size of the lyrics proved to be especially
problematic, because as far as I can tell, the only way to adjust the lyric
point size overall is to do it in a *relative* manner, for example:
  \layout {
    \context {
      \Lyrics
      \override LyricText #'font-size = #-1
    }
  }

But I can't figure out exactly what relative adjustment will get me to 11-point
type.

As far as the actual music goes, Lilypond's output looks good, although
definitely the staff lines and stems are all thicker and heavier than what I'm
used to.  

In this style of music, the glissando is usually written as a "trill-style"
glissando, which I handled by putting:
  \override Glissando #'style = #'trill
in my global block (repeated in every voice).
The trill-glissando looks strange if there isn't enough space between the notes,
but it looks fine for larger spaces.

When the two voices on a staff, share the rest, I expect to see one rest,
centered.  This seems to be difficult to do in Lilypond.  Searching through the
archives, I found this suggestion, which worked okay for my sample piece:
  \revert Rest #'direction
but then I also found several people saying that this does not work for dotted
rests, and I could not find a general solution to the problem.

One awkward aspect of doing this kind of music in Lilypond is the way that the
lyrics are mostly together, but occasionally split off for just a couple of
measures (see measures 27-28 of the sample piece).  It is possible to set up
multiple lyric lines, and just fill most of them with skips, but this means
accurately counting how many un-lyricized notes occur from the beginning of the
song to measure 27.  Someone suggested using more voices to distinguish they
rhythmically independent lines, which may be a worthwhile approach to this 
problem.

Finally, I still haven't figured out how to do the melody-following line in
Lilypond (see measures 12-13 in the sample piece).

Some things I haven't even begun to look at, but I assume are doable with some
effort:
numbering every measure
headers
footers
smaller note font for optional notes
markup of "x" where lead goes higher than tenor.
dashed slur lines

If anyone can offer more suggestions for developing a template that fits this
specification and can handle all the notational elements this style requires,
that would be great.  If anyone wants to take a stab at engraving a Lilypond
version of the sample song, and see how close we can get to the reference
version, that would be even better!