You're talking about the old LaTeX accents -> utf-8 ?
Manual conversion is necessary with current convert-ly. I can
think of three ways to automate it. They're all kind-of hackish,
but they'd work in theory. It just needs somebody to translate
that theory into practice.
Conversion of "LaTeX encoding" to any other encoding, esp. UTF-8 is
easy.
I've a little script ready for such - but it converts whole files, I
don't know if it will affect LilyPond commands.
Here:
http://www.fiee.net/texnique/?menu=0-2-2&lang=en
you can download the "mab2bib" archive, it includes "utf2latex.py".
This was option #3. :)
Just this script can save some time. Ideally, somebody would spend
two
hours modifying this script so that it only looks inside \markup or
\lyrics or something like that. Then perhaps another two hours to
integrate it with convert-ly -- or, if that's not possible/ideal, dump
it somewhere on the web and get our convert-ly docs to point to it
as a
"helper script" for a particularly difficult transistion.
I'm not offering to do any of this, but if somebody else is
interested,
I'm quite willing to mentor them and help them through these steps.