Christophe writes: | I find PDF a good (if not perfect it's a lot better than GIF IMHO) | format for document exchange and I found useful to say that to help | users who want to exchange music with non abc litterate friends.
Yeah; PDF (and PS) are a lot better than GIF or any other format that sends the scan lines. PS and PDF draw lines and curves to the best resolution of the output device, so their quality is as good as that device can produce. GIF is only used because browsers understand it. (Wouldn't it be useful if browsers would display PS and PDF? As far as I can tell, the reason they don't is that PS and PDF are patented formats owned by Adobe. This ought not to matter, since it's legal to decode and display them. But it's easy to understand why people might be wary of doing something that has a high probability of getting IP lawyers involved. ;-) | Saying that PDF files coming from the *abc*2ps/GhostScript road are | unreadable seems a little too much for me. It depends on your screen, mostly. When I first tried GhostView on my home machine, it was very nearly unreadable. About half the staff lines and most of the note stems were weird multi-color things that didn't look much like music at all. It may have had something to do with my color settings. Of course, I had no clue why it was so awful. It took a lot of experimenting until I stumbled across the "antialias" setting, wondered what it was, flipped the setting, and saw some very nice music notation suddenly appear on the screen. | So I thought it could be useful to tell them to turn off antialiasing | (for example, with GSVIEW 4.* on a Windows box, go to the Media/Display | settings menu and set the Graphics Alpha to 1 bit). With the version for unix/linus systems, it's the "State" menu, which has an "antialias" item. It's easy, once you know about it. But I've never seen any documentation on this, though I have dug around in the GV and GS docs quite a bit to learn about some other things. It's a bit odd that this would be on by default. It also messes up a lot of text, though the damage isn't as bad as with music. As far as I can tell, antialiasing is only useful with images, and not with very many of them. So by default antialiasing should be off. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
