Grand Advanced Stylesheet Project (GASP)

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hello all!

I recently sent a post about my choral piece, and had to *not* use my choral 
stylesheet. Seeing what the default output looks like lit a fire under my butt 
to get a stylesheet project going ASAP — I haven’t really seen a default 
Lilypond score (as opposed to tiny snippets) in at least two years, and had 
honestly forgotten how unelegant it looks.

My idea is that we have a basic set of stylesheets for the main types of scores 
— e.g., piano solo, organ solo, instrumental solo/part, choir, full score, etc. 
— which can be \include-d by the user to give a truly beautiful default 
appearance right out of the box.

By way of an example, my choral_octavo stylesheet results in the attached 
screenshot (which shows the top ½ of the first score page of my setting of 
“When You Are Old and Grey”). To my eye, that is significantly superior to the 
default output.

I realise that a lot of the final, fine-detail decisions would be subjective… 
But I offer that there would be many benefits to including with the standard 
distribution a well-crafted (e.g., with default fonts, better spacing 
parameters, better titling options and layout, etc.) hierarchical collection of 
default stylesheets that individuals could call with a simple (e.g.)

    \stylesheet “choral_octavo”

and then extend (e.g., incorporating non-standard fonts, etc.) as 
needed/desired.

Would anyone be interested in working on this with me?

All the best,
Kieren.
_______________________

Kieren MacMillan, composer
www:  <http://www.kierenmacmillan.info>
email:  address@hidden