Re: stylesheets, defaults, and other in-Pond-erables

[Kieren MacMillan]

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).

Cheers,
Kieren.