I’m wondering if anyone has built or tried to build the Lilypond library for the iPhone platform, to render engraved music on an iPhone-OS-powered device? I’m considering this for an upcoming project, and wanted to ask a few questions before diving in to trying it myself. Here goes:
1) How do you rate my chances of getting Lilypond to compile for the ARM-based iPhone OS, especially given the number of libraries it depends on?
2) Would there be any licensing issues in using Lilypond (and dependent libraries) in a paid app on a closed platform such as the iPhone?
3) What’s the likely performance of rendering .ly files on a lower-powered (and lower-memory) device such as an iPhone or iPod Touch? Is it likely to take seconds, minutes or hours? How about on an iPad? (I’m looking for rough guesses here, before I go through the pain of attempting compilation.)
4) If performance is likely to be a no-go, what are my best alternative? Server-side PDF generation for delivery to a device?
Any thoughts or ideas much appreciated. I’ve a fair bit of experience in Mac open-source development (I wrote much of the audio code for Handbrake), but I’m new to Lilypond, so would be starting from scratch in compiling it.