A while back I built a music publishing company (long defunct) and used LilyPond to engrave all of our scores. I received comments from quite a few established composers that the engraving was the best they'd seen from any publisher.
I ended up with a collection of macros I used for common tasks. Probably the most-used was a macro that manually overrode the positioning of an element to be more visually pleasing or less confusing. Of course, it could be argued that the need for this indicates a deficiency of the engraving engine (and this was sometimes the case), but a manual final pass makes the difference between functional and professional-looking results. LilyPond's markup language made this easy.
LilyPond's test suite taught me the value of comprehensive test-driven development: every bug starts as an addition to the test suite, and a visual diff—including a numerical value indicating the amount of change—is taken of the entire suite in between versions. In this way, regressions are quickly identified.
I ended up with a collection of macros I used for common tasks. Probably the most-used was a macro that manually overrode the positioning of an element to be more visually pleasing or less confusing. Of course, it could be argued that the need for this indicates a deficiency of the engraving engine (and this was sometimes the case), but a manual final pass makes the difference between functional and professional-looking results. LilyPond's markup language made this easy.
LilyPond's test suite taught me the value of comprehensive test-driven development: every bug starts as an addition to the test suite, and a visual diff—including a numerical value indicating the amount of change—is taken of the entire suite in between versions. In this way, regressions are quickly identified.