If you look at figures 2.19 and 2.20 in http://icking-music-archive.sunsite.dk/software/pmx/lcgpmx.pdf using Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat Reader, or the Acrobat plug-in, you may notice parts of some of the slurs to be missing. These slurs use the postscript fonts, not the Type K or M postscript slurs. I showed this to my good friend John Di Pol at work (a non-musician, the same guy I credited in the PMX manual for his contribution to the beaming algorithm). After about 10 minutes he figured out what was happening and how to fix it. The Reader has an algorithm for "Greeking," which basically means replacing any font character smaller (in some sense) than some threshold, with a gray rectangle. The default setting for this threshhold in Adobe Acrobat 4.0 is 6 pixels. At normal viewing resolutions the horizontal part of long slurs somehow falls below the threshold, and the replacement rectangle for some reason has a height of zero.
To fix this you can change the threshold. In Adobe Acrobat 4.0 the menu item is File|Preferences|General where you should either uncheck the box "Use Greek Text ...", or leave it checked but put in a small enough number that the problem goes away. What about Acrobat Reader, or the normal browser plug-in that comes with it, or any other OS besides Windows? I don't know because I don't have them. On my home system the settings in Adobe Acrobat 4.0 appear to apply to the Navigator plugin as well. Christian told me he had the same problem but I don't remember if he said exactly what S/W he was using and I don't have his email right at hand. By the way, this doesn't appear to be an issue at all with Type K or Type M postscript slurs, I suppose because those slurs are not made from font characters. Nor is it an issue if you use ghostview to view the pdf, a fact that Christian pointed out. I had been thinking the problem was in the Distiller part of Adobe Acrobat 4.0, but I was wrong; it's in the Reader part. There is an issue here for the sheet music archive: Is there a need for some sort of warning about this to Joe General Visitor, who could innocently open a link to a pdf and see screwed up slurs on the screen? Since there hasn't been much (if any) noise about this in the past, I tend to think a warning isn't needed. But if the consensus is that we should have one, and if Christian is willing to do it, John suggested that some javascript could be written that would run every time someone clicks on a pdf in the archive. The script would first look for a cookie that had been set on an earlier visit to any pdf in the archive. If it found one, then it would exit and display the pdf, and the visitor would not know the difference. If not, it would set the cookie, then display a popup with instructions about disabling the Greeking, and also explain that the popup will not appear again if you accept cookies. --Don Simons _______________________________________________ TeX-music mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://sunsite.dk/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
