Re: [Denemo-devel] Sibelius 7 to LilyPond Conversion!

[Richard Shann]

On Fri, 2015-10-30 at 07:56 -0300, Thomas Wilmot wrote:
[...]
> > > it into Denemo and trying the "Quick LilyPond Part" option. 
> >  I thought 
> > > it might try to export just whichever part was selected, but it 
> > > exported the entire thing as it normally would.  I still don't 
> > > understand what it's supposed to do.  It's great to have so many 
> > > tooltips, but the program would be a lot easier to learn if 
> > they were 
> > > more explicit.  Also there are random windows popping up when I do 
> > > certain things like selecting a measure.

This "random windows popping up" I think must be the tooltips on windows
for newbies. Turn them off via the Help menu.


> > 
> > I tested out
> > Quick LilyPond Part
> > before writing the email, it saves the staff that the cursor 
> > is in using the current filename myfile.denemo to construct a 
> > filename myfile-denemo-n.ly where n is the staff number. 
> > 
[...]
> 
> I got it to work eventually and also at one point a window did pop up telling 
> me I needed to save the file first.

>   But I don't think this happened the first time.
It wasn't happening with Quick LilyPond Export only with Quick LilyPond
Part. So you would get confused if you ran both scripts with and without
having a filename available for the scripts to export to.
Ok, I just fixed the Quick LilyPond Export silently failing if no file
name exists for the score. The Quick LilyPond Part script did warn about
this already. And the tooltips *do* explain where the output is
filename-denemo-n.ly or whatever.



[...]
> > at the bottom to let yourself know that it has got through to 
> > the end of the script. Those scripts all just start at the 
> > cursor and go through the objects from there on so you need 
> > to place the cursor at the start of the staff (Home key does that).
> > 
> 
> So wait, you have to run it on each line individually?

yes - if you have 20 staffs then it would be worth putting a loop round
the script, I see that I've done this for the conversion of incorrect
slurs to ties (it's in the Notes/Rests->Ties menu in 2.0.0).

[...]
> Yeah, I'm using 1.2.4 right now.
> I would try 2.0.0 if it would help, but this project is due in an hour and a 
> half! :P

:)

> > > Is that how you change the font?  I typed a different font 
> > name in the 
> > > field but it is strange it wouldn't have a list to choose from.
> > > 
> > > My problem is not with the font the music itself is set in 
> > in the main 
> > > windowpane. My big problem is with the font displaying the 
> > rest of the 
> > > interface such as the menus and tooltips.
> > 
> > yes, it is the menu/tooltip font that is specialized so that 
> > a tooltip can say "Change to 𝅗𝅥 from 𝅘𝅥 " and you can read it 
> > easily without having to have a very large font size (which 
> > causes its own problems because the menu sizes get to long 
> > for peoples screens).
> > 
> > >   I expect it to be MS Sans Serif in every single program 
> > everywhere, 
> > > since that is what I have it set to! To be fair, sometimes even 
> > > Microsoft's programs override this user system preference (which is 
> > > awful) but they always replace it with something while 
> > still inferior, 
> > > still hinted and NEVER anti-aliased! This is a HUGE deal 
> > for me when 
> > > using any program or Web site.  Microsoft released a number of Web 
> > > fonts for everyone, well hinted at all small sizes which became a 
> > > standard since they were free for everyone, and now so many 
> > sites are 
> > > using these plug-in Google fonts, some of which are pretty 
> > darn good 
> > > (like the one YouTube is using everywhere now), and others of which 
> > > look horrifically blurry! The one on the Denemo site is one of the 
> > > better ones, except for the two-story lower-case italic g, 
> > which looks 
> > > ridiculous! That is a small offense however!
> > 
> > I've not understood anything much about aliasing and hinting, 
> > I have a suspicion that the denemo.ttf is not really properly 
> > constructed, I just spliced together some bits of fonts with 
> > some glyphs to be able to write e.g. "quarter note" or 
> > "crotchet" in an internationally understood way as 𝅘𝅥 and 
> > still be read.
> > 
> Well they are comprehensible so I suppose that's the main thing!
> Hinting is a process of drawing fonts at every size they are going to be 
> displayed at perfectly by hand.  It's obviously the best, but time consuming 
> of course so most people these days don't bother because of anti-aliasing 
> (basically filling grey in the cracks to cheat, which does make it look 
> blurry usually) or sub-pixel rendering which is better, but properly hinted 
> fonts are unbeatable.  It looks like the Denemo Web site uses those Google 
> fonts but also forces the browser into sub-pixel rendering (sacrificing 
> colour accuracy for the appearance of fine detail) which is a good thing in 
> this case.


Thanks for the background info on fonts, aliasing and hinting. LilyPond
does hinting (I think - different fonts for different point sizes?),
that's why the typesets are so good. Some day a fonts guru will come
across denemo.ttf and make it beautiful...

Richard