Generating a score for screen display

[Pete Yandell]

I'm writing a music tuition type app for Mac OS X, and Lilypond is  
top of my list of potential tools for generating scores for display  
on the screen. Lilypond seems a good choice because it can spit out  
nice looking scores in PDF, and can also spit out some basic MIDI.

Now the questions. I have several, in order of importance:


1. Can I work out which notes in the MIDI file correspond to which  
notes in the PDF of the score?

I want to highlight notes on the screen as they're played, so I need  
to map between the MIDI data and locations of notes in the PDF.

Currently, as a quick-and-dirty solution, I'm scanning the PDF for  
the hyperlinks that connect the notes back to the original source  
file, sorting these, and assuming that one note in the score equals  
one note in the MIDI file. This is (obviously) not what you'd call a  
robust solution. Any of the Lilypond gurus/developers suggest a  
better way?


2. Can I generate a score as a single horizontal line rather than as  
multiple lines and pages?

I may want to have the music scroll horizontally as it is played,  
rather than vertically. To do this, I'd need to make Lilypond spit  
out one long line of music.


3. Can I make Lilypond put all the staff lines, bar lines, note  
stems, etc. on integer pixel boundaries such that horizontal and  
vertical lines aren't anti-aliased?

Obviously this would make the screen display a bit nicer.


I realise that all this stuff is not really what Lilypond was  
designed for, but I'm hoping that someone out there will see it as an  
interesting challenge and lend me a hand, or at least point me in the  
right direction. :)

Cheers,

Pete Yandell