lilypond-book/LateX Beamer: best rendering practice?

[Florian Hollerweger]

Hi all,

As mentioned earlier, I am planning to deliver a Lilypond workshop together 
with a friend at this year's Linux Audio Conference. For the workshop slides, I 
already have a working setup using lilypond-book --pdf in combination with 
pdflatex and LaTeX Beamer.

However, I am not entirely satisfied with the *on-screen* PDF display that my 
current setup provides.
In particular, the BWV 861 comparison between Finale (PDF from [1]) and 
Lilypond (generated with lilypond-book --pdf and pdflatex) does not look half 
as convincing as the PNG comparison on the website [2], no matter which PDF 
viewer I use.

Don't worry, I am not gonna embark on a discussion of barline thickness for 
on-screen PDF rendering :) But I would be interested in your suggestions re. a 
best Lilypond rendering practice for my following requirements:

===BEGIN LETTER TO SANTA===
- On-screen display must be of sufficient enough quality to convince also 
without printed examples. The benchmark is the BWV 861 comparison mentioned 
above.

- Must use lilypond-book and LaTeX Beamer, but choice of Lilypond/LaTeX output 
format (PDF, PNG, PS, etc.) is flexible.

- I don't care which viewer application (acroread, Okular, etc.) I have to use 
for the presentation, but it should ideally work under Linux.

- Doesn't hurt if the final document looks good in print, too :) However, I'd 
be willing to implement two parallel rendering toolchains for on-screen and 
print.
===END LETTER TO SANTA===

I have a feeling this might boil down to a PDF vs. PNG showdown?

- For "high-quality" LaTeX documents, PDF seems to be preferable to PNG, hence 
my initial choice of pflatex and lilypond-book --pdf.

- But I get the impression that PNGs (rather than PDFs) might be the way to go 
for better-quality on-screen display of Lilypond output?

Any comments or pointers in the right directions will be greatly appreciated!

Best,
flo.H


References:

[1] 
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=lilypond.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/pictures/pdf/bwv861-finale2008a.pdf;h=b4d64e6d06f68af78e3e39a0f49283b04a48be03;hb=HEAD

[2] 
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.16/Documentation/essay-big-page.html#Engraved-examples-_0028BWV-861_0029