Re: Alternating text and music

[Aaron Hill]

On 2019-07-27 12:03 pm, David Wright wrote:
> On Sat 27 Jul 2019 at 18:57:35 (+0200), David Kastrup wrote:
> > David Wright <address@hidden> writes:
> > > I would advise against that because PNGs are rastered. The hint is in
> > > the name: portable-Network-graphics.
> >
> > Uh, what in the name indicates rasterisation?
>
> Perhaps I was a little oblique: "Network" indicates that the format is
> designed for transfer of images over the network, rather than between
> local applications. Compromises are made in favour of smaller size and
> higher transmission speed, rather than maintaining resolution; not
> desirable for engraving pages of music.

Vector formats are equally as well-suited for transmission over a 
network.  PNG might have been created with the Web in mind; but to me, 
nothing about networking would seem to prefer raster over vector.  In 
fact, vector is pretty common on the Web these days, whether in the form 
of SVG or web fonts.

> I'm not overconcerned whether people see this as a hint not to use
> PNGs in this workflow. But I assume you're not supporting their
> use, are you.

This is purely anecdotal: I use PNGs in my workflow with no issues 
whatsoever.  Mind you, I am using them for projection not print.  In 
practice, I have LilyPond rasterize at a higher DPI than I need for the 
target resolution and then use ImageMagick to down-sample so I can 
better control the quality of smoothing/anti-aliasing.  It is admittedly 
a little overkill, as I doubt members of the congregation could notice 
the finer details given the distance to the screens.

For the record, when I do use LilyPond specifically for print, I almost 
always use PDF as the output.  On occasion, I have had to use a raster 
format when I was compositing music within a document.  In that case, I 
just crank up the DPI in order to saturate the resolution of the 
printer.  Again, I suspect few people would be able to tell the 
difference given the printed document.

-- Aaron Hill