Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing
John Chambers wrote: Hmmm ... I see I wasn't specific enough. With JPEG, GIF and PNG files, you can include them *inside* a page with a tag like: img src=http://foo.bar.com/junk.gif; alt=pretty picture This will cause the image to be displayed as part of the web page, surrounded by text. Does this work for .ps, .eps or .pdf files with these browsers? No it doesn't. You can actually fake it using the FRAMESET function, but it's rarely a good idea. Frank Nordberg http://www.musicaviva.com To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] antialiasing and test on ps files
Eric wrote: If you want to have a look, I've copied the test files here : http://anamnese.online.fr/lastened/princess.gif and http://anamnese.online.fr/lastened/princess.pdf http://anamnese.online.fr/lastened/princess.ps This seems to make my point exactly. I've put up a picture containing screen captures of princess.gif (captured from my browser) and princess.pdf (captured from Acrobat Reader 4.0) so you can see the results on my screen. The top picture is the gif. The pdf is actually rather better than average (only the text seems to be antialiassed here), but is still clearly inferior in quality to the gif. See http://www.barfly.dial.pipex.com/princess.gif Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] antialiasing and test on ps files
Forgeot Eric wrote: I don't really agree, even if you're right in some extends : A gif file (I mean a partition) that looks cool on a browser with 16 colours is ci. 9 ko. The same in ps is 29 ko, but converted in pdf it's only 11 ko (I've tried for a small tune). Well, yes and no, Eric. The difference in size between a gif and a pdf file isn't nealy as big as some people belive, but there is a difference. Ghostview seems to create fairly large gifs. The equivalent BarFly/Graphic Converter output is only half the size. A Musica Viva style GIF would be even smaller. As for Postscript files - it's not unusual for a file created by one application to be four or five times as large as a similar file created by a different application. This difference is mostly, but not completely, evened out when the file is converted to pdf. (Of course, if file size is the *only* issue, you should just post the abc. In this particular case, you only need 806 bytes for that.) --- My site, Musica Viva, includes more than 500 PDFs and a few thousand ABCs, but GIF is still the main format for sheet music on the site. There are a number of reasons for this: a) Old habit - When I started the site, PDF simply wasn't a serious alternative. b) File size - The difference between a single PDF and a single GIF might not be so big, but how about 8000+ of them? I already use more than 200 of the 50 MBs I have available, so I have to be very careful to make evetyrhing as compact as possible. c) Viewable on any browser - I happen to be a firm supporter of the anybrowser campaign ( http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ ). GIF is by far the format that comes closest to that ideal. d) Viewable on any computer - Ever tried to open a really big PDF file on a old computer? e) Flexibility - Unlike PDFs, GIFs can be embedded in a html page, opening up a large nuber of options (to many to list here). f) Reliability - GIFs are far more rugged than PDFs. I don't have to worry about broken files, and I don't have to worry about people being unable to read the file because of some stupid software incompaibility. g) Speed - GIFs load faster than PDFs even if they're the same size. h) No plug-ins required - Let's face it, there are lots of computers that don't have Acrobat Reader installed. There are lots of users who have no idea what to do about it. There even are lots of older computers that simply don't have enough muscle to run such a heavy porgram. i) Security - The way I've set up Musica Viva makes it hard for people to steal the content of the site. j) It's good enough - The GIFs at Musica Viva are good enough for everyday use. You can read the sheet music, and you can play from it. What more do you expect for free? k) I'm a professional - In an ideal world I would have been able to make a living giving people music to play, but this world is far from ideal. That by site actually costs me a lot of money! I give away the basics for free just because I like to think of myself as a nice peson. But if you want more than that from me, I want to see some cash from you. If you *demand* more than that, you've got a serious attitude problem. Frank Nordberg http://www.musicaviva.com To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing
On Sat, 15 Jun 2002, Atte Andre Jensen wrote: On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, Phil Taylor wrote: John Chambers wrote: GIF is only used because browsers understand it. No, it's used because it's the most efficient way of compressing a black and white (or 256 colour) picture into a small file. True in low resolution files, but not in print quality. Yes, that's the big advantage of vector formats, they don't count the dots, so they don't scale up the same way. Necessarily. Though I have seen postscript which appears to contain embedded bitmaps ... Browsers, of course, are mainly dealing natively with low-res images. Which works well in our context - gif for screen images of tunes, and abc for printing. The newer PNG format is just as good, and free, but not yet as popular. Why? For exactly one reason: browsers (the big one esp) were not supporting png until recently. And since one must expect quite a few users to still be using their 4.0 or 5.0 browsers it's still not safe to use png on web pages. Sad, since png is superior to gif in all ways Yes. I thought of switching the images in my Tunebook over to png a couple of years ago, but a little bit of checking and asking around convinced me that there were just too many browsers that wouldn't do it. Newer versions might, but that doesn't mean older ones have disappeared. When does the Unisys LZW patent run out, anyway ? It can't be long now, surely ? -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] antialiasing and test on ps files
I wrote: Eric wrote: If you want to have a look, I've copied the test files here : http://anamnese.online.fr/lastened/princess.gif and http://anamnese.online.fr/lastened/princess.pdf http://anamnese.online.fr/lastened/princess.ps This seems to make my point exactly. I've put up a picture containing screen captures of princess.gif (captured from my browser) and princess.pdf (captured from Acrobat Reader 4.0) so you can see the results on my screen. The top picture is the gif. The pdf is actually rather better than average (only the text seems to be antialiassed here), but is still clearly inferior in quality to the gif. See http://www.barfly.dial.pipex.com/princess.gif Perhaps I should say that the results are quite different when printed on a Postscript printer. I printed all three files out on my HP 6MP Laserjet (600 dpi postscript laser printer - old and slow, but very good quality). The gif was good quality (just like the screen picture). The pdf was perfect. The postscript would have been perfect if the printer had had the correct font for the title and composer. As it was, it substituted Courier font, which looks a bit naff. Conclusions If you know that the recipient wants to print out the music, and has a postscript printer, and the file size is irrelevant, then pdf is the best choice. Under all other circumstances gif is better. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing
Richard Robinson wrote: The newer PNG format is just as good, and free, but not yet as popular. Why? For exactly one reason: browsers (the big one esp) were not supporting png until recently. And since one must expect quite a few users to still be using their 4.0 or 5.0 browsers it's still not safe to use png on web pages. Sad, since png is superior to gif in all ways Yes. I thought of switching the images in my Tunebook over to png a couple of years ago, but a little bit of checking and asking around convinced me that there were just too many browsers that wouldn't do it. Newer versions might, but that doesn't mean older ones have disappeared. For Linux, the latest Netscape I could get (the last time I checked) was 4.51 or something like that, and I don't think it does PNG yet. And on my laptop, on which I run Windoze 98, I got a later version of Netscape and hated what they'd done to it, so I still use a 4.xx version there, too. Rick To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing
Rick == Rick Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Rick For Linux, the latest Netscape I could get (the last time I Rick checked) was 4.51 or something like that, and I don't think Rick it does PNG yet. I think it does; I think all Netscape 4.x does png. I'm running 4.73, and it certainly does. -- Laura (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] , http://www.laymusic.org/ ) (617) 661-8097 fax: (801) 365-6574 233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139 To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing
Laura Conrad wrote: Rick == Rick Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Rick For Linux, the latest Netscape I could get (the last time I Rick checked) was 4.51 or something like that, and I don't think Rick it does PNG yet. I think it does; I think all Netscape 4.x does png. I'm running 4.73, and it certainly does. Hmm. I 'll have to try it again. Thanks. Rick To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing
Well put, Mr. Chambers. I for one appreciate your "long and useless comments." Keep up the good work! Dave Musgrave McDade, Texas, USA This is both facetious and insulting. The abcusers list existsprimarily to help users. These are mostly musicians who aren'tcomputer experts, but who are attempting to use abc notation. Tellingpeople to go away until they've first found the answers to theirquestions is arguing against the main value of this list. (Good stuff deleted)
Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing
Agreed. Why else would one subscribe to this list than to read and benefit from long and useless comments? ;-) Rick On Fri, 14 Jun 2002 09:15:17 -0500 Paul Musgrave [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well put, Mr. Chambers. I for one appreciate your long and useless comments. Keep up the good work! Dave Musgrave McDade, Texas, USA 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. (Good stuff deleted) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
RE: [abcusers] Antialiasing
De : [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]De la part de John Chambers Envoyé : vendredi 14 juin 2002 15:25 À : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Objet : Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing 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. Sorry for that, John, if you take it like that. 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. Saying that PDF files coming from the *abc*2ps/GhostScript road are unreadable seems a little too much for me. 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. 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). Christophe To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing
Rick writes: | Agreed. Why else would one subscribe to this list than to read and benefit from |long and useless comments? ;-) Paul Musgrave [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: | | Well put, Mr. Chambers. I for one appreciate your long and useless comments. |Keep up the good work! Dave Musgrave McDade, Texas, USA Heh. I was a bit apprehensive about being too harsh. But the fact is, this isn't an abc-wizards list. It's abcusers, and the naming conventions imply that newbie-level discussions should be welcome. One of the real problems with a lot of mailing lists and newsgroups is arrogant RTFM comments from the more expert members of the discussion. Such remarks are intended to drive off novices. While this is appropriate on a wizards list, it's quite out of place on a users list. We don't want to drive away our new users, who are often somewhat clueless. This is especially true for a subject like abc, which exists for musicians, not computer experts. It is interesting that there have been several attempts to start up abc mailing lists for more advanced users and developers, but these haven't been very successful The developers especially seem to want to talk in the users forum and get feedback from musicians who are not abc experts or developers. This is generally a good sign. It keeps the programmers in touch with the end users. But we do need to be on the watch for experts who will insult and discourage novices. They need to be told in no uncertain terms that this is not a forum for experts. (And we all need to do a better job of keeping the Subject: line more accurate. ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing
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
Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing
John Chambers wrote: 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. Aint necessarily so. When you export a GIF (or PNG, BMP, JPEG etc.) from a program which displays music on the screen, what you get is exactly what is displayed on screen. If you send that to another user it will display on their screen exactly as as it did on yours (maybe bigger or smaller if their screen resolution is different, but with no distortion of the symbols). If that user prints it out it will look the same as it does on screen: OK, but not great, since it won't take advantage of the higher printer resolution and won't look as crisp as you might expect. When you export a Postscript file, or the PDF made from it, what you get is the information which would be sent to a Postscript printer. Send that to another user and the results on screen are quite unpredictable, depending on the software and settings used, the screen resolution and colour depth etc. The results will vary from almost unreadable to OK, but not great. The same applies if that user prints it on a non-postscript printer. If she prints it on a postscript printer the results will always be excellent. So ps good, gif bad is quite wrong. It depends what they are going to be used for. Gif is safer, since it will always look the same as it does to the sender, and will never be illegible. PS (or PDF) can give much higher quality under certain specific conditions, but can also produce atrocious results when those conditions don't apply. GIF is only used because browsers understand it. No, it's used because it's the most efficient way of compressing a black and white (or 256 colour) picture into a small file. The newer PNG format is just as good, and free, but not yet as popular. JPEG is better for full-colour pictures and BMP is uncompressed, so yields unnecessarily huge files. (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. ;-) It would be useful, but these would not replace gif or png in web pages because the file sizes are much larger and the download times that much longer, and because the results on-screen are unpredictable. | 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). Ho ho! How is the naive user expected to understand the connection between Graphics Alpha and antialiasing? 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. Antialiasing has it's uses. Perhaps I should explain what it does, for the benefit of the less-well informed. When a computer is instructed to draw a line from position x1y1 to position x2y2 on a display device, it must translate that information into a row of coloured pixels. If the line is horizontal or vertical, the result looks like a clean line, as all the coloured pixels are adjacent. If the line is diagonal, the result will be a staircase, which doesn't look so good. If the instruction was not just for a simple line, but for a pattern such as five equally-spaced horizontal lines whose spacing is different from that of the screen pixels, some distortion is inevitable, resulting in the lines being drawn different distances apart. The distortion is called aliasing because it's exactly analagous to the aliasing which happens in audio when you play two closely related frequencies together. Graphics antialiasing is achieved by filling in the pixels which would be partially included in the lines with shades of grey. The staircase effect on diagonal lines disappears because the steps have been filled in with grey pixels, and the eye sees this as a smooth continuous line (unless you use a magnifying glass to see how it's done). With the staff pattern however
Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing
On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, John Chambers wrote: (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. ;-) Which is why we use GIF instead. Right. *grin* 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. I hadn't realised this until you just mentioned it. -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Antialiasing
On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, Phil Taylor wrote: John Chambers wrote: GIF is only used because browsers understand it. No, it's used because it's the most efficient way of compressing a black and white (or 256 colour) picture into a small file. True in low resolution files, but not in print quality. The newer PNG format is just as good, and free, but not yet as popular. Why? For exactly one reason: browsers (the big one esp) were not supporting png until recently. And since one must expect quite a few users to still be using their 4.0 or 5.0 browsers it's still not safe to use png on web pages. Sad, since png is superior to gif in all ways -- love, peace harmony Atte To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
