Creating a comparison of several variants of unmettered chant

[Jiri Zurek (Prague)]

In musicological literature, it is common to create comparative systems
(staffgroups) where each staff holds the reading of one given version of the
chant. The music is aligned so that melodic patterns common to all the
versions are visually boosted by aligning them under each other. (Please,
see the attachment not prepared in lilypond).  
http://old.nabble.com/file/p27515617/comparison.jpg 

Such a staffgroup is not ment to be performed as polyphony (all the staves
simultaneously together). Rather, its purpose is to compare different
versions of the same monophonic chant.

The problem is how to vertically align the notes in the desired way, i.e.
how to match vertically the common melodic patterns? Are there tools in
lilypond to achieve the result in a way which is humanly manageable?

As I reported 
http://old.nabble.com/Parallel-unmettered-music-td27370445.html in other
thread , the parallel music seems not to be the right solution as it always
tries to "count" the beats and align them as if the music was to be
performed simultaneously. Perhaps, the solution would be to keep adding a
lot of skips to the score so that at the end the notes are vertically
aligned as desired, but this is quite burdensome task, especially in
non-mettered music! Are there other simpler ways to achieve the vertical
alignment of bits of music regardless of the beats?
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