automatic fingering annotation

[erik flister]

hi-

i'm writing some software that generates .ly files and want to offer
the option to automatically add (woodwind) fingering chart annotations
to the engraving.  the project is in haskell and i'd rather not learn
scheme or lilypond internals.  the problem is determining the octave
-- i want to support relative octave entry
(http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/writing-pitches#relative-octave-entry),
but i don't want to reimplement relative octave detection (not because
it's hard, but i in principle don't want to duplicate logic).

i would think automatic fingering annotation would be a desirable
feature in lilypond itself -- perhaps a markup flag where i request
the standard fingering for the note, maybe some way of selecting a
predefined alternate fingering (nice to have would be rules for
determining prefered fingerings from the previous note, a way to
define fingering libraries to choose from, etc).

i assume that wouldn't be anyone's priority to implement, so either i
could try to myself from within lilypond, or (my preference) i need
some way to ask lilypond for the octave -- either an API or
command-line program or something where i give an .ly snippet and
lilypond gives me back the absolute pitches.

what do you think would be the best way?

thanks!
-erik