LilyPond benchmarks - request for proposals

[Urs Liska]

Hello LilyPond users,

LilyPond's declared claim is "automated engraving", and we're often 
talking about how exceptionally good its default results are. But we're 
also often talking about stuff that isn't good enough by default (see 
for example Janek's blog post about how many slurs and ties he had to 
fix for our big Fried edition).

So I thought of collecting a concise set of reference or benchmark 
scores to be put on a - not too prominent - place on lilypond.org. These 
should explicitly be done without any styling overrides or manual tweaks 
(only some page layout may be accepted if the type of score requires it).
These benchmarks would automatically be built for any new version of the 
website and give us a clear picture of what has to be done to achieve 
perfection.
And I think that - even with exposing our "imperfections" - we're not 
giving away because this default output scores will always be soo much 
better than most of the competition could hope for.

Today I'd like to ask for suggestions: a) to assemble a set of score 
_types_ to be used in that benchmark series, b) possibly for concrete 
suggestions.

Of course the example scores should expose (more or less) exemplary 
input style.
For a start I will set up a repo on Github until it's reasonably 
finished to be included in the website.

My ideas so far are:

- classical piano piece

- string quartet

- solo instrument

- moderately complex orchestral score

- SATB choir with piano

- complex song
  -> We'll probably be able to use one of our Fried songs for that

- complex score from 20th century (not graphic yet)
  -> I have a proposal for that already:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49478835/lily-examples/variations-and-theme-default.pdf


Thanks for any ideas and/or contributions.

Urs