Saying hello and considering my first contribution

[Chad Thatcher]

Hello all,

I am new to Lilypond and the devel list so hello to everyone.  I  
think Lilypond is a fantastic program and as I am a developer would  
like to contribute something to the project.  Selfishly, I would like  
my first contribution to be something that convert an ancient incipit  
to the Lily textual format to allow Lily to reproduce it in musical  
notation.

I am currently working with a cataloging project at the British  
Library which is recording all musical manuscripts between the years  
1600 and 1800, I have developed an application for them to data input  
and manage the manuscripts.  The information supplied with each  
manuscript sometimes comes with an "incipit" for the beginning of the  
music.  Here is an example of an entire incipit pulled from the  
record for Sonata 1 by Johann Sebastian Bach:

''4G{3G FbEDC'BA5 BG}{8GxF+}{3FEDEFGA''5C'B}/''8{C+3C5DC'3B''C} 
{6.Ct'5B''C6D'A}'' 8G'3-{G5AB''CD}{8b E'B}/{6BA''bED}8-{BxF} 
{6D3DbEDC'B''5C'A}{3BxFGDbE''5DC'B''CC'B''C}/

I would like to convert this to Lily textual notation so that Lily  
can then reproduce it in musical notation so regular users of the web  
catalogue can just click a link and run this up into Lilypond.  My  
main problem right now is that while I am a good developer I have  
only just begun learning about music and see this as being a real  
problem. I would like to hear from anybody on this matter and whether  
or not I am spitting into the wind on this one given my dire lack of  
knowledge of music.  I would also like to find out if anyone else has  
had a stab at this kind of thing.  Finally a few pointers as to where  
to start looking in the extensive programmers docs would be very useful.

Kind regards,

Chad.