Re: Horizontalized scores

[David Kastrup]

"Chris Crossen" <address@hidden> writes:

> Thank you all for the help I've been getting on my efforts to produce
> the .png images I want with Lilypond.
>
> I am almost there. My current problem is that staff lines, measure
> bars, and note stems are being anti-aliased despite being perfectly
> horizontal or vertical.

There is no "despite" here.  If a line has a thickness of 1.5 pixels,
its weight can only be represented properly using grayscaling.  In a
similar vein, if a line position is between raster points, you need
grayscaling to move its position into the right place without changing
the total weight.

> This makes them look fuzzy.

Ultimately, the only thing that works for getting proper positioning,
thicknesses, unfuzziness is to match the distances to the available
pixels.  That's what
<URL:http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=3533> tries to
do, but it does not really catch all required measurements.

Alternatively, get a really high resolution device.  There are a few
changes one can do in the PostScript code (-dstrokeadjust is one such
change), but they come with different drawbacks and have different
effects depending on the rasterizers used.

Everything else is the tuning of rasterization compromises.  You can try
going through other rasterizers by working, say, with Acrobat on the
PostScript produced with LilyPond, or by going through the SVG backend.
And you can try playing with Ghostscript's options for converting
PostScript to PDF.

> When I use GIMP to convert a pdf produced with Lilypond to a .png, I
> get nice crisp verticals and horizontals, no anti-aliasing. And, the
> note heads and other rounded parts are beautifully anti-aliased.

I don't think that GIMP does anything but call Ghostscript for the
rendering (though I might not me up-to-date with my knowledge).  So this
would boil down to figuring out the options it uses.

> Does anyone know of a way to make Lilypond produce .png files with
> anti-aliased rounded parts and crisp straight lines?

LilyPond does everything by writing PostScript files.  PNG are produced
from there via Ghostscript, PDF via pdf2ps which just calls Ghostscript
with specific options.

-- 
David Kastrup