I'm a rank -- very rank ;-) -- amateur when it comes to reading music, music theory, and LilyPond. In fact, I may be somewhat dyslexic given the troubles I've had with various types of printed information -- musical or otherwise.
So, my main use for LilyPond has been s-l-o-w-l-y, painfully, transcribing the wee squiggles I see, then generating the MIDI to listen to, so that I can play by ear. It's worked out pretty well, and I am becoming a wee bit faster at it.
So, the templates I have, probably aren't going to help anyone here. Nonetheless, in the spirit of the previous posts in this thread, which I may learn something from, I offer my very few, very modest efforts, which I'm sure could be improved upon.
Four small, simple templates, plus two "macros" for deciding my formatting -- one for SVG another for PDF -- plus Grey Larsen's Irish "ornaments", which I didn't write. It was posted to this list (Copyright © 2014, Bret Pimentel.
http://bretpimentel.com) but, since the Irish template automatically includes it, I figured I would include it here again.
The templates have some "Lorem Ipsum" junk in them so that when I start editing, I can replace the random stuff with meaningful stuff. It's more of a guide for me. Also there's a bit of redundancy with regard to the SVG vs. PDF: Some of the templates have the "old way" in addition to the snippet that decides, based on what is passed to LilyPond on the command line, which macro (svg.ily or pdf.ily) to use.
templates.zip