I'm looking at getting an OCR program to recognize scans in pdf files and create MusicXML files representing the contents. I would then use the musicxml2ly or perhaps some other script to translate the MusicXML to Lilypond files, I imagine that some of you are already doing this, and I wonder whether you could give me or point me to some tips as to what software to use and how to go about it.
Using MIDI files as the intermediate representation may also be a possibility. I'd appreciate hearing about that, too. thanks