OK. Here's a pair of demo images that show off all the clefs, note heads, note tails, ordinary accidentals and a few other things:
First one is standard Lilypond; second one is mine. Things I specifically disliked about LP and prefer about mine include the treble clef (LP's is absurdly tall by the standards of most others, the curved line down the middle makes it look as if it's leaning backwards, and a couple of parts are rather unevenly curved); the trill (LP's is unpleasantly ornate, mine is more in the style I was used to from music I actually played); the time signature digits (IMO much more readable if they're small enough not to collide with the outer stave lines, though actually making them miss at both ends turned out to take some cheating!); the sharp (LP's is too wide and also too slanted for my taste); the fermata (mine looks like an arc of a circle whereas LP's non-vertical ends make it look oddly parabolic); the quaver tails (some differences between the down and up tails are a good thing, but I think LP takes it a bit far). And if you look very closely, LP's minim head has a knobbly outline, but it isn't really clear at this resolution.
Most importantly, I find I can read my version without the notation jumping out at me: I find it does a better job of fading into the background. Standard LP looks like strangely stylised music, whereas mine just looks (to me) like music.
Thank you. I shall have to flick through some of the music I own and see what I think - I'm not sure I've much looked at music and thought "that's nice"; sometimes really badly typeset music hacks me off, though.
Seeing you mention your interest in early music in your own LJ reminds me of something it might be worth me mentioning up front: I haven't actually quite implemented a drop-in replacement for the whole of the Lilypond font. I've done most of it, but there are a few obscure pieces I've left out on the basis that they probably wouldn't come up in normal use and I could wait to see if anyone actually really wanted them. One of those, in case it turns out to be important to you, is the entire section of the LP font that deals with early music notation: mensural and all that. (One reason I haven't done it is because I don't know anything about it – I'd prefer to understand the aesthetics and readability requirements before I sit down and draw fifty glyphs that might turn out to be completely useless.)
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First one is standard Lilypond; second one is mine. Things I specifically disliked about LP and prefer about mine include the treble clef (LP's is absurdly tall by the standards of most others, the curved line down the middle makes it look as if it's leaning backwards, and a couple of parts are rather unevenly curved); the trill (LP's is unpleasantly ornate, mine is more in the style I was used to from music I actually played); the time signature digits (IMO much more readable if they're small enough not to collide with the outer stave lines, though actually making them miss at both ends turned out to take some cheating!); the sharp (LP's is too wide and also too slanted for my taste); the fermata (mine looks like an arc of a circle whereas LP's non-vertical ends make it look oddly parabolic); the quaver tails (some differences between the down and up tails are a good thing, but I think LP takes it a bit far). And if you look very closely, LP's minim head has a knobbly outline, but it isn't really clear at this resolution.
Most importantly, I find I can read my version without the notation jumping out at me: I find it does a better job of fading into the background. Standard LP looks like strangely stylised music, whereas mine just looks (to me) like music.