Re: Fragments; quality of png, and unuseable eps, when using --preview

[Brett Duncan]

Rick Hansen (aka RickH) wrote:
> v2.9.22 (Win XP)
>
> I'm using the following command lines to create small musical fragments that
> I can later reference in a word processor document that has text and various
> musical excerpts:
>
> EXAMPLE BEGIN
>
> To make a small useseable PNG snippet:
>
> "C:\Program Files\LilyPond\usr\bin\lilypond-windows.exe" --png -p
> "C:\Job015\smallsnippet.ly"
>
> To make a small EPS snippet:
>
> "C:\Program Files\LilyPond\usr\bin\lilypond-windows.exe" -b eps
> -dno-gs-load-fonts -dinclude-eps-fonts "C:\Job015\smallsnippet.ly"
>
> EXAMPLE END
>
>
> It's working great, except that the PNG files produced seem a little bit
> "fuzzy" to me.
>
> Is it my imagination, (my eyes are not as good as they were 40 years ago)? 
> Is the quality of the PNG output a little on the low side?  Can the default
> quality level be upped easily for a future release?
>
> Also I tried imbedding the accompanying .EPS file that is also outputted by
> the above command.  But in my word processor they show up as a blank
> rectangle (Microsoft Word, Win XP).  I have a suspician that the fonts are
> somehow not available in the EPS for Word to render properly, but the file
> sizes are around 200k for just a one measure snippet, so thats probably the
> fonts.
>
> Anyone else have these similar problem using musical fragments as either EPS
> or PNG?
>
> Ideally I would like to use the EPS files for embedding in other documents
> (because I assume they are lossless in terms of future quality).  But I
> would need a fix for the possible bug with why the EPS files show up blank? 
> For the time being the slightly fuzzy PNG files will have to do, until I can
> track down the EPS problem.
>
> (Note: the EPS command above I got straight from the user manual)
>
> Thanks to anyone who has already gone down this path and can provide some
> insight on either the PNG or EPS problems I'm having.
>
>
> Rick

The default resolution for PNG appears to be 101 dpi. After the --png 
flag in your command, add

        -dresolution=300

to get 300 dpi, or whatever you prefer.

Even though you can set the resolution to whatever you like, I'd also 
like the default to something like 300.

The fuzziness, however, may or may not be the PNG resolution.

I did some work for a friend who's been creating a learning kit based on 
the music of Ross Edwards - he also found Microsoft Word rather 
frustrating. Even though the scores and snippets that myself and another 
friend passed to him were all 600 dpi (mine from LP, my friend's from 
Sibelius), when he went to print the document, all the scores and 
snippets were fuzzy, both on-screen and printed. However, when we 
transferred the document to my laptop and printed it, everything came 
out beautifully (especially the LP bits ;-) ).

Now, do you think we could isolate the difference between how Word was 
set up on my laptop and on my friend's? I wish.

I don't know enough about EPS to really comment on those problems, 
sorry, but did you try printing them? - EPS files may still print 
correctly (on a Postscript printer, of course), even if they do not 
display anything more than a bounding box.

Also, I noticed you said you wanted EPS because of losslessness - PNG is 
also a lossless format, and personally I'd rather work with PNG than EPS 
any day.

Brett