Re: Quality images for Wikipedia - several questions

[Patrick McCarty]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 8:36 PM, Steve Taylor <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> What I'd like to know is whether SVG output from LilyPond is ready yet for
> this task?  I've seen some previous discussions on SVG output having been
> broken and recently repaired in the current beta versions.  I've tried some
> suggested solutions but haven't got it working yet.

Yes, the SVG output has been improved in the 2.13 series.  It should
work out-of-the-box if you invoke LilyPond like so:

  lilypond -dbackend=svg myfile.ly

What suggested solutions are you referring to?

> Specifically, I'd like it to be simple to specify just the music content
> (even just a clef and two notes forming an interval) and create an SVG image
> file suitable for uploading to Wikimedia commons (for use in all languages
> of Wikipedia around the world).

Great!  The SVG output should work fine for this task, after cropping
(see my comment below).

> Can lilypond fit the image size snuggly around the music (with no footer or
> tagline) rather than fitting the music to a specified page size?  The
> snippets database appears to produce output like this.

Not yet.  This is on my TODO list.  Specifically, it requires
implementing an output-preview-framework:

http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=968

You could use Inkscape to crop the SVG files though.  I can't provide
precise instructions at the moment since I haven't done this in a
while.

> Are there any concerns about the images not being viewable on some browsers
> or operating systems (e.g. missing fonts)?

I haven't found any problems yet.  Though if you want *absolutely*
precise rendering, use the "convert-text-to-path" feature in Inkscape
on all text markup.

Hope this helps, and let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Patrick