Hi David,
I think this comment is somewhat glib. I'll start another thread to discuss it. But briefly, the colleague whose music I engrave writes very complex scores and his practice is to use 3cm = 1 second to indicate the flow of time to the performers as an extra axis of information. While I personally do not think this is a good idea, he does, and I am told that musicians who perform these difficult works find it helpful. It's not for me to argue against this. So the thing is that he can do this with a pencil at the drafting board, and it's disappointing that lilypond is incapable of duplicating that, despite its hugely powerful layout engine. As for starting on the barline as per graph paper, you miss the point. The distance between barlines is intended to show the time flow in the piece, and of course the notes have left and right margins in the bar, the same as a book has margins. But within the margins in the bar it's nice if the notes are quite proportional. I can't achieve this in lilypond with the proportional notation settings because the tempi and most common note values fluctuate hugely and I am unable to get even layout. It's something I - and others - wish lilypond could do, and whether you agree with the practice or not, it's valid I believe to want to be able to duplicate handwritten MSS where the composer considers this important. Lilypond is heavily biased to Common Era music, and that's well and good and where it excels, but I think with the amount of contemporary modernist music being written people could be a bit more open to more contemporary techniques.
I probably have not expressed this very eloquenty, but as said, I think this needs to move to another thread, to avoid hijacking this one.
Andrew
(As an aside, it amuses me to read the posts from people who want their
scores' x-axes treated precisely like graph paper, with strict
proportional spacing. Surely this means that the first note of each
measure should overprint the barline.)