Automated engraving benchmarks

[Urs Liska]

Hi, I just had an idea.

We've been talking a lot about automated engraving which is LilyPond's 
official claim. When discussing our Fried edition David K rightly 
pointed out that a score requiring numerous manual tweaks is locked to a 
particular LilyPond version and can't easily be updated for newer LP 
releases.

But as far as I can see there is no reliable way to see how far we have 
got with this goal.

See the attached example. This clearly shows that LilyPond has gone a 
long way in recent years (particularly compared to Finale where the 
(attached) 2014 output is nearly identical to that of Fin2008). But it 
also shows that we're far from being "automatic".

I suggest creating a set of "benchmark scores" and putting them 
somewhere on the website. Not at a prominent place in the introduction, 
but maybe somewhere around "Development" or "Community" (I will get to 
that part of the website some day ...). After all, despite all headroom 
for improvement LilyPond really doesn't have to hide its capabilities in 
this area.

The rules would be: No manual tweaks (no. 1!) and no style overrides.
Only page set-up is allowed (but there only page and staff size, margins 
only when there's a good reason).
The scores should represent LilyPond's default output which should also 
make them maintainable and unlikely to break with syntax changes.

I'm currently entering an old dodecaphonic style study for violin and 
piano which quite looks like late Schoenberg. (The surprise about how 
incredibly readable this complex score is rendered was the trigger for 
this idea.) When it's finished I'll offer this as an example.

Another one will (hopefully) be one of the complex Fried songs which 
_are_ real challenges for LilyPond.

But of course we should then have "default" scores like a classical 
piano piece, a string quartet and a moderately complex orchestral score.

What do you think?

Best
Urs

schoenberg-2-19-1.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

schoenberg-2-10-33.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

example for urs - one system 2014.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document