Christophe writes: | Antialiasing is a feature you can turn off both in GhostView and in | Acrobat Reader. | | Please learn to use the tools you discuss before writing long and | useless comments.
Um, I think I'd strongly disagree with that. To paraphrase, "First learn to use the abc tools, and then we'll asnwer your stupid questions about them." This is both facetious and insulting. The abcusers list exists primarily to help users. These are mostly musicians who aren't computer experts, but who are attempting to use abc notation. Telling people to go away until they've first found the answers to their questions is arguing against the main value of this list. Questions about viewers are especially relevant, both abc viewers and viewers for formats like PS and PDF. Most abc users want it converted to conventional staff notation. So questions of the form "Why the hell does it come up so unreadable on my screen?" are quite relevant. If you can't read what's on the screen, that seriously interferes with your use of the software and the abc files. Antialiasing is an especially awful subject. Most musicians won't have any clue what this means. Even if they've seen the word in one of the menus in the app they're using, they won't suspect that it has anything to do with why the music looks so awful. If they are familiar with the term from audio context, they still probably won't suspect that it's related to their problem. The audio meaning has very little to do with the usage in video. The disappearance of a staff line because of "antialiasing" isn't due to a wrong frequency appearing in the output; it's a case of something disappearing entirely. It's not really an aliasing problem at all. But this is what the PS/PDF viewers call it, so it's the word you've gotta use to explain how to fix it. OTOH, we could encourage people to correct the subject line. This branch of the topic has veered away from "Embro". Keeping that subject means that people who killfiled the topic have missed a new topic that they might have found interesting. And people who killfile the message because they know all about "antialiasing" will also miss the "Embro" followups. So rather than discouraging people from discussing a highly relevant topic about usability of abc tools, we should be harping on keeping the subject line meaningful. Then the people who don't want to waste time on a subject can use their reader's "kill" facility. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
