Dear Dev team, You requested some feedback about your PDF importer.
We have a problem with using impress in the display of musical scores. If we convert the scores (from Lilypond or Sibelius) to eps and Insert->Picture- >From File, the resulting rasterised image on the screen isn't really of presentable quality. This is because musical scores are particularly challenging for raster formats: the horizontal lines can easily get messed up if one isn't careful. The result looks like the screeshot1.png attached. The PDF plug-in looks very promising. Unfortuantely, there seems to be a bit of a font issue. When the attached pdf is opened in draw, the musical symbols aren't rendered in the correct font. The font is embedded in the PDF file, but not installed on the computer. I guess this is just not rendered into the draw file, which is a shame because the staff lines look really very clean on what gets imported, and one could imagine the result being just what's required. Rendering is also lightening-fast, which is important if you are trying to move between slides in order to follow the score as the music plays. Currently it looks like we will have to produce a workaround by concatenating PDF files from various different sources in to a PDF slide show, but this means all of the advanced presentation features of Impress aren't available to us. I would be interested to know what you think about methods of importing embedded fonts. Another current work-around is to read the pdf file into scribus, then export it as pdf with all the fonts outlined. This can be read with reasonable fidelity into draw, and the systems cut-and-pasted into impress which looks fine on a 800x600 projector. It's not perfect, but it's still pretty damn good! Maybe there's a command-line way to split pages and convert all the fonts to outlines, but I'm not sure. The utility pdftk will burst the file to many pages, but won't outline the fonts as far as I'm aware. Thanks for a such a robust tool. I've not seen the "stability and resource" issues you mention on your web page :) Nick/. ---- Dr N J Bailey Director, Centre for Music Technology Dept Electronics & Elec Eng, The University of Glasgow.
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