I’m beginning to implement the idea I mentioned a couple of days ago, of creating dual tuba and string bass editions of my band parts using LilyPond tags. It seems to work reasonably well.

The advantage of trying something rather than just thinking about it, is that it also generates practical new ideas. In this case, since the main hassle is that I have to comment or uncomment various lines that aren’t directly part of the music, I’m wondering if I could do that with a tool like awk to detect some kind of flag and flip-flop the % comment marker that LilyPond responds to?

That way I could store all the information in one file and run a simple command to uncomment all the lines I want to keep and hide the ones that need to be concealed. I might not even need the comments in most cases – often I’m just changing a couple of words that could be represented by flags in the source file, with a temporary, customised script being generated with the appropriate replacements.