Splitting Staves

[Valentin Petzel]

Hello,

As it is I think one of the important features missing in Lilypond is the 
ability to split one staff into multiple staves, which is a feature quite 
nescessary for orchestral and choral settings. There is an ”official“ hack to 
do 
it by using different staves and switching context, but this is neighter 
beautyful nor useful in large settings and it bears the problem that one needs 
to manually specify all these splits, including System breaks &c.

So what I want to work on is some sort of ”Splittable Staff“. Main specs should 
be:

→ At any point in the Score a staff should be splittable
→ Splits can be denoted by a markup like divisi
→ If a split occurs within on system, one should have the choice between:
→→ Extending the split to the whole system, doubling not split notes (as it’s 
usually done)
→→ Splitting the staff in the middle of the system, as sometimes done in more 
complex scores.
→ There should be a penalty for having a longer split start or end in such a 
way, that it eighter starts very late into the system or ends very early in 
the system (leading to lots of duplicated stuff)
→ One should be able to specify brackets for splits
→ One should be able to specify if a split will occur only at a barline 
(potentially doubling stuff) of at any point
→ There should be a way to make Voices work nicely with splits (so if you 
split four Voices 1,2,3,4 from high to low into 1,2 and 3,4 they should 
automatically be remapped to the voice configurations 1,3,4,2 when together, 
and 1,2 and 1,2 when split.
→ It should be possible to do nested splits
→ It should be possible to specify Instrument names for split Staves

I have thought up a way one could specify this, but I do not have time to 
elaborate it here, so I will probably follow up on this.

Now, for the gist of my question: I’m very well versed with the Lilypond 
codebase, so I appreciate if someone could give me a few directions, what 
parts I should study to get into the right direction.

Best regards,
Valentin

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