Re: Size Reductions

[David Raleigh Arnold]

Lilypond defaults produce lines which are legible even at half the
customary size (4.25 16ths") and many programs don't, but *no*
typesetter or engraver would simply reduce everything by half to get
the smaller size. There would necessarily be design differences, and
liquid ink itself causes a difference.

I am not asking for a different font for every size, but I think that it
would be a good idea to have all line thicknesses, including stems,
bars, beams, brackets--all practicable, and horizontal spacings somewhat
proportionately greater for smaller sizes, the way they would be with
typeset or engraved music, to make the smaller sizes more legible.

This would mean that if you do the normal spacings as fractions of
notehead size or otherwise type size dependent then the values of those
units would change somewhat as the sizes are decreased. It would be
nice to be able to print music in large, normal, or small size without
having to make any optimizations in the collision spacing or line
thicknesses. A settable horizontalspace-reduction-ratio and
linethickness-reduction-ratio should take care of it.

BTW I never got any version of lilypond with documentation to install on
mdk 7.2. I gave up when faced with the prospect of downloading over 10
megs of java sc on a 24.6k phone line, with no guarantee that that would
be the end of it. (A runtime environment wasn't enough.} The
distribution simply doesn't have enough tools. It installed at least. Rh
7.0 froze.

Are you talking to the developers of sketch about dumping into their
program? I suspect that they would be delighted to help. *Please*
include it in 1.4.

Is it possible to have ly2dvi produce separate files for each page? I'm
sorry this did not occur to me long ago, but this would solve the
problem of what to do about double side printers extra pages, and also
provide a more flexible way of printing both sides for us poor people.
Double sided printers could use a script or even wildcards, and the rest
of us could simply turn the pile over--*or not*.  For myself, I see no
prospect of *ever* wanting to have multiple printable (not source) pages
in a single file without their being zipped and tarred, because I tend
to print 12 to 80 copies at a time.  :-)

Problem solved: I got a lot of "load A4" from my printer in spite of
setting every setting I could find to "letter". If I simply press
"resume" on the printer, everything prints. A request for A4 is one
thing and a requirement of it quite another. I don't remember this
coming out in previous discussions. 

Thanks a million for this noble enterprise. Apologies for stale news,
if any. Bless you. :-)

--  daveA (debian.user)