On 2010-09-24 17:42, Phil Holmes wrote:
It's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong, somebody) that LilyPond is optimised neither for screen or print - it outputs as PDF, and so the quality of the image seen depends on the quality of the program that interprets the PDF. LilyPond is essentially simply telling the PDF viewer/printer "draw a line from here to here".
I think that's a point where LilyPond's output is harder to interpret than that of other applications: Lily uses quite sophisticated varying line thicknesses, and IIRC, bar lines, staff lines etc. are drawn as rectangles. It comes to no surprise that PostScript /lines/ in, say, Finale files are less sensitive to zoom changes. The viewer can use a single pixel as minimum thickness, probably plus antialiasing, no matter if the line should actually be thinner. For screen output, that's perfectly fine. On the other side, Lily's /rectangles/ need more involved handling to get such tweaks fine. At least, the viewers don't seem to try a similar subpixel-resolution effort for more than lines.
[ All this is pure speculations which I can't back up. I don't /know/ for sure whether the viewers take such an approach, and what exactly the PDF instructions generated by different engravers, including LilyPond, are. But I have the strong suspicion from several files I've seen that it's not too far from the truth. ]
In summary, I like the approach taken by LilyPond for it's superb printed output. If it's "just" a matter of exchanging line and rectangle commands, there might be way to yield better results, but I'm certain the different options have already been considered for the current implementation in a wider context than just this. The only thing that really bugs me for the time being is that in several viewers and small zoom levels, the staff line-note head-fitting is really bad. (This includes Adobe Reader, Evince and Okular, but not MacOS X preview, IIRC.) No clue if we can change this with Lily's code, though.
Just my two pence... Cheers, Alexander _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
