I recently tested LilyPond on Windows 8 (Enterprise Development
Test version running on VirtualBox). It appears that LilyPond does
not support any OpenType features on Windows 8 (at least as of
version 2.16.2).
We have issues
<URL:http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2657> and
<URL:http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2656>. At
one point of time in the 2.16 release cycle, they were considered
release critical. They only reason they have been downgraded is
that nobody is working on them and nobody has a clue _how_ to work
on them, so there was no point in stopping the release process for
them when no solution was going to appear magically.
Yeah. We urgently need a developer working on Windows who is
sufficiently familiar with GNU stuff, in particular with Pango and
Harfbuzz. Behdad Esfahbod, the developer of Harfbuzz, is willing to
help provided we have someone who can test and debug patches.