The post-production discussion of a big LilyPond based [Edition] (http://lilypondblog.org/category/fried-songs/) raised considerable and renewed interest in the performance of LilyPond when it comes to complex notational challenges.
While LilyPond's default output is undisputedly extraordinary readable it is still not perfect - the amount of necessary tweaks in said edition is a telling witness. So we're quite interested in getting a better picture of how the actual balance is between a relatively small number of tweaks and the relative complexity to achieve them.
In order to investigate this further we thought of a "challenge project" comparing LilyPond with other notation programs in a strictly regulated environment. Demanding tasks of different kind (style, structure, historic period etc.) form a context in which the performance of each program can be analyzed.
While the challenges are explicitly meant to be comparisons we deliberately don't want to call them "contests". The main goal of the project is pin-pointing potential areas of improvement rather than nominating someone a winner.
If you're interested in participating in this adventure feel free to contact us through
ul at openlilylib dot org (or the [lilypond-user]
(https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user) mailing list). You should be confident
to be able to work efficiently with your notation program and have a current version of it.
It would be good if you would also have experience with version control
and can work with our Git repository because you cannot add or update
binary files through the web interface. But that's not a strict requirement and we can assist you with that.
The "rules" of the contest are explained in the meta
folder.
Each challenge is contained in an individual top-level directory, with
some specific information in a README.md file that will be displayed automatically when you open that directory.