Re: Cropped output (à la -dpreview) possible in Finale and Sibelius

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Have you seen
> http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2658 ?  *That's*
> appalling - and it's how LilyPond output is rendered :( :( :( (image
> attached) It's sad that there are no comments on this issue after 9
> months :(

It's a very hard problem and probably not solvable.  Essentially, it's
the same as hinting fonts.  The smaller the resolution or size, the
more distortions are necessary to make the glyphs, staff lines, stems,
etc. align to the output device's pixel grid.  Graphical objects
simply don't obey glyph hints!  In other words, you will always find a
resolution which produces irregular output.  And no, it's not just a
rounding issue: At smaller resolution, it would look horrible if the
lines of a staff are not evenly spaced.

The probably most important thing IMHO to get decent results on screen
is setting up a proper gamma correction for the user's display,
together with a good PDF viewer.  The goal is that the blackness of
`unsharp' lines gets evenly distributed so that they look similar to
aligned ones if viewed from a certain distance.


    Werner