Re: Stencil bounding box

[David Feuer]

On 4/27/06, Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> wrote:

> the bbox isn't used, but it's no problem, since the "child" bbox isn't
> stored, just the expression.

Oh, I missed that.

> Frankly, I'm a bit mystified why you're spending so much time on
> building the ultimate postscript backend.  The backend is not a
> performance bottleneck. If you think the current PS code is inefficient,
> then you should have a look at the rest of LilyPond.

1.  It's the only part of Lilypond I have thus far been able to understand.
2.  I like making things small, pretty, and fast.  Output especially
should be small, pretty, and fast.

> Yes, but to me this seems hardly related to music typesetting. I think
> it would be in better style to look for a standardized PDF/PS output
> library and offload all of the PS/PDF generation to there. Dealing with
> PS and PDF is a huge sink of developer time, since it tends to turn up
> all kinds of bugs and compatibility problems in
> PostScript/GhostScript/acrobat/etc. It would be a good thing if we could
> outsource that effort to another project.

That's an interesting thought.  I don't know if there is such a thing,
or whether such a thing would be sufficiently flexible or efficient
without being just as hard to deal with.  Also, I suspect that by
changing the output as I've suggested, we will be better able to deal
with compatibility issues.

David