Hello,
My high-level goal is to display music notation in Cocoa, quickly. I'd
like to use LilyPond for printing at some point, so using it for
display seems very natural. However, LilyPond seems to only work with
files. I haven't run any tests yet, but I'm thinking it would be way
too slow to write my input to a file, fire up lilypond, and then read
its output from disk and display it. The obvious thing would be to
keep a lilypond process alive, pipe it stuff, and get output (probably
pdf) from standard out that I can send to Quartz. Of course, that
still might not be fast enough. There would be other possible
optimizations from there. I will only be changing little bits of the
score at a time.
So my questions are:
1. Is LilyPond even the right tool for the job?
2. Is there a way to do this already?
3. Would realtime display be feasible even if this were implemented?
4. How much would it cost to have it implemented?