Re: Feedback request on image formats

[NickS]

Personally I certainly much prefer vector formats, as these scale much better in documents, are more editable if customisation is required, and they can easily be batch-converted into raster formats of the required resolution if needed.

My main usage case is including Lilypond snippets in large LaTeX documents via lilypond-book, which means EPS format, and I would certainly not want to lose this functionality! (My current project is a 500-page LaTeX document containing over 1600 Lilypond snippets!).

My second usage case is importing Lilypond snippets into LibreOffice Impress to create presentation slides. In this case EPS files, once imported, can't be broken into their components, while SVG files can be broken into their components but the text elements are imported as individual Bezier curve objects for each character and I have to manually replace them with text objects. In this case the best solution I have found is:

• import Lilypond generated SVG files into Inkscape
• export the result as (plain) SVG,
• import the SVG into LibreOffice Impress where I can break it into its components (that include real text objects for the text elements).
  

I also thank you for asking.

Best wishes,

Nick

On Tuesday, 10 January 2023 at 22:23:53 GMT, 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