Discussion: automatic engraving and single-source publishing

[Urs Liska]

Hi,

recently I wrote that LilyPond input files - being plain text - are a 
quite natural choice for single-source or cross-media publishing.
However, I'm not so sure anymore that this is really true (yet).

When finishing a LilyPond score to publication quality there is quite a 
lot of tweaking involved - as you can see from Janek's recent posts on 
lilypondblog.org. And this tweaking makes the engraving very specific, 
actually it's only valid for a specific page layout and even a specific 
LilyPond version. Using the same score in a different context will now 
involve quite some hassles: clever versioning strategies, complicated 
tagging or plain rewriting.
Each of these solutions is more or less impractical, and I think they 
are far away from real cross-media publishing.

If I want a score to be working in a printed book and in a beamer 
presentation, if I want to reformat the score on a display on the music 
stand depending on user's choice of cue notes or let it reflow depending 
on screen resolution etc. I think we'd need really automatic engraving, 
as LilyPond actually advertises already. At least to an extent where 
there are no tweaks necessary for the quality demands at hand.

Do you have any opinion or experience on this matter?

Urs