Personally I certainly much prefer vector formats, as these scale much better
in documents, are more editable if customisation is required, and they can
easily be batch-converted into raster formats of the required resolution if
needed.
My main usage case is including Lilypond snippets in large LaTeX documents via
lilypond-book, which means EPS format, and I would certainly not want to lose
this functionality! (My current project is a 500-page LaTeX document containing
over 1600 Lilypond snippets!).
My second usage case is importing Lilypond snippets into LibreOffice Impress to
create presentation slides. In this case EPS files, once imported, can't be
broken into their components, while SVG files can be broken into their
components but the text elements are imported as individual Bezier curve
objects for each character and I have to manually replace them with text
objects. In this case the best solution I have found is:
- import Lilypond generated SVG files into Inkscape
- export the result as (plain) SVG,
- import the SVG into LibreOffice Impress where I can break it into its
components (that include real text objects for the text elements).
I also thank you for asking.
Best wishes,
Nick
On Tuesday, 10 January 2023 at 22:23:53 GMT, Jean Abou Samra
<j...@abou-samra.fr> wrote:
Hi,
This is a little call for feedback, especially from users of the \epsfile
markup command. (To be clear, I'm not speaking "in the name of the
development
team", just in my name.)
Over the past year and a half, LilyPond has gained a new output
backend based on the Cairo graphics library. While this backend
has many advantages, there's a downside: it is not possible with
Cairo to include EPS files in PDF output. Yet this is the only way
today to include images, via the \epsfile markup command.
To address this limitation, we're considering adding support for more
image formats than EPS. We will likely add PNG. However, because PNG
is a raster graphics format while EPS can contain vector graphics
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics), we'd like to add a
vector graphics format as well. Basically, the contenders are PDF
and SVG. However, each of them requires adding dependencies, so we'd
rather not have them both.
Which leads to the question in this straw poll: would it be more useful
for you to be able to insert SVG or PDF images? Keep in mind that both
can be converted into each other seamlessly, so the question is mainly
what will be most useful for a majority of people.
Thanks,
Jean
