SVG output sponsorship

[Vivian Barty-Taylor]

It seems to me that having reliable (bug-free) SVG output would be a  
big plus for Lilypond. At the present  time, I have been unable to fix  
all the font problems (not sure whether this is Lilypond or Inkscape  
which is giving me trouble.) To get to where I am at I had to make a  
lot of changes by hand to the SVG file which is tedious. (Specifically,  
the italic sans-serif fonts still don't work.)

The main advantage of the SVG output (I would suggest) is that small  
changes to positions of objects can be done in a WYSIWYG environment,  
instead of the current estimate-how-much-I-have-to-move-that-object/  
add line of code/ re-process score/ find out I haven't moved it enough/  
moved it too much/ change values of #'padding or #'extra-offset etc.  
etc. all of which is time consuming especially with big projects.

While I'm a committed Lilyponder, and much prefer the output to other  
programs, this would seem to be a valuable investment in terms of  
user-friendliness. Could you give me an estimate of what this would  
cost, Han-Wen? Are there others who would be willing to co-sponsor  
this?

Cheers,
Vivian.


On Aug 11, 2007, at 7:53 PM, Erik Sandberg wrote:

> On Sunday 08 July 2007, Benjamin Esham wrote:
> > Benjamin Esham wrote:
> > > I'm having some issues with Lilypond 2.10.x's SVG export.
> >
> > I seem to have fixed most (all?) of my font problems.  I now have  
> > another
> > problem, however.
> >
> > In order to submit one of LilyPond's SVGs to e.g. the Wikimedia  
> > Commons, it
> > is necessary to convert all of its text into paths; that way, users  
> > need
> > not have LilyPond's fonts in order to view the image correctly.   
> > Before
> > converting text into paths in Inkscape, you must make sure that none  
> > of the
> > text is contained within a group.  Therefore, I started to process my  
> > file
> > by selecting everything and issuing an Ungroup command.
> >
> > When I did so, the staff lines disappeared!  Apparently every object  
> > in the
> > file is in a one-element group.  For some reason, ungrouping the staff
> > lines made them disappear—they were still present, just not visible.   
> > I
> > think there may be an Inkscape bug at play here too, since "Select  
> > All"
> > couldn't find the lines, but on the LilyPond end... how can I get  
> > Lily to
> > create a sane, usable SVG file?
> >
> > Any help is greatly appreciated here.
>
> There's another approach to the SVG output problem: You can take PDF  
> or EPS
> output from lilypond, and try to turn it into SVG files. The postscript
> backend of lilypond is obviously more mature, and there exist  
> converters from
> pdf/ps to svg. Free converters are a bit shaky, but for some lily  
> versions I
> managed to convert .ly files into valid SVG via a chain of converters.
>
> Usually, you need to first expand fonts to curves using some ps2ps-like
> script, and then use pstoedit to convert to something that can be  
> converted
> to svg. Unfortunately, most conversion tools are rather immature, so  
> you will
> need some experimenting to make it work. IIRC, I managed to generate  
> valid
> svg with this method for my master's thesis, using a lilypond version  
> around
> 2.6. I don't remember the exact combination of commands that worked  
> though.
>
> (I have vague memories that it may be good to start with pdf output and
> convert it back to eps)
>
> Here's a script that works for some subsets of ps (not lily's though),  
> you can
> look at it for ideas:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Electronics/ 
> Ps2svg.sh
>
> If you manage to find a fairly reliable path to convert the output of  
> a recent
> lily version into wikipedia-usable SVGs, I'd be happy to know.
>
> Erik
>
>
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