Re: Feedback request on image formats

[Abraham Lee]

If I had a vote, and if PDF really can be seamlessly converted, I would make the front-end favor the SVG format as I think that format would be more likely used by most users.

Glad to hear about this! Both PNG and SVG would be very nice additions.

Best,

Abraham

On Tue, Jan 10, 2023 at 3:23 PM Jean Abou Samra <jean@abou-samra.fr> wrote:

Hi,

This is a little call for feedback, especially from users of the \epsfile
markup command. (To be clear, I'm not speaking "in the name of the
development
team", just in my name.)

Over the past year and a half, LilyPond has gained a new output
backend based on the Cairo graphics library. While this backend
has many advantages, there's a downside: it is not possible with
Cairo to include EPS files in PDF output. Yet this is the only way
today to include images, via the \epsfile markup command.

To address this limitation, we're considering adding support for more
image formats than EPS. We will likely add PNG. However, because PNG
is a raster graphics format while EPS can contain vector graphics
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics), we'd like to add a
vector graphics format as well. Basically, the contenders are PDF
and SVG. However, each of them requires adding dependencies, so we'd
rather not have them both.

Which leads to the question in this straw poll: would it be more useful
for you to be able to insert SVG or PDF images? Keep in mind that both
can be converted into each other seamlessly, so the question is mainly
what will be most useful for a majority of people.

Thanks,
Jean