sofa2ly : a new preprocessor for lilypond

[Richard Martin]

sofa2ly : a new preprocessor for lilypond

sofa2ly is a rudimentary perl script which converts tonic sofa choral notation 
into roughly-corresponding lilypond input files.

Tonic sofa is a text-only music notation used widely in Anglophone churches in 
Cameroon (where I happen to live and work). Lots of time is spent hand-
transcribing staff notation into sofa for use by church choirs here, but there 
is also a lot of traditional and modern music which is only available in sofa. 
Composers, singers, and choir directors have welcomed my initiative to try to 
automate the production of staff editions of Cameroonian choral music. (Let me 
be precise: everyone else is happy that they're getting staff editions of their 
music; I'm happy that the process is largely automated.)

sofa2ly accepts text-file input corresponding to the sofa notation used, and 
spits out the core of a lilypond input file. It relies on the intelligent 
transposition code shipped with lilypond (broken out into transpose.ly) and is 
relatively intelligent.

It's also a little large to send to the list -- 12k of perl, plus about 14k of 
examples and "documentation".

So this is a request for interest, and an offer to share, and a request that 
someone might have a little space on an ftp server. I can email it to 
interested parties, and it may be possible to go from there... I do hope that 
others might suggest how it might be improved, and possibly help improve it as 
well. (My understanding of lilypond is limited, and my perl is rusty and bad. 
But it works.)

Cheers,
        Richard

-- 
Richard Martin, ex-University of Toronto
address@hidden