Re: Vector touchup

[Christian Mondrup]

Jeff Henrikson wrote:
> 
> > Forgive me, but I don't know enough about the gimp to know whether this
> > would be practical or not.
> >
> > If most notes and symbols were layered on fields small enough to hold
> > in memory but large enough to grab, fine adjustments could be made in
> > the gimp by dragging. I'm sure that we all would rather that everything
> > worked without problems, but this would be a way to improve useability
> > *now*.
> 
> The gimp?  I wouldn't recommend it, as the gimp is a bitmap editor as opposed 
> to a vector drawing program.  Unfortunately there has
> never been a good free vector editor.  Xfig just doesn't cut it compared to 
> CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator in the way that GIMP
> compares to Adobe Photoshop.  Recently there has been of course the adoption 
> of the SVG scalable vector format based on XML by W3C,
> and more recently an attempt by GNOME to do an SVG editor ("Gill") and the 
> further along KIllustrator for KDE.  A good summary from
> the perspective of the authors of Gill:
> 
> http://www.levien.com/svg/report1.html
> 
> KIllustrator might be a good way to go.  Um, is Lily still using bitmap 
> fonts, or is it using all metapost outlines?  Are lingering
> bitmaps the reason for fonts in discrete increments (paper20, paper16 etc)?  
> That could actually make a big difference in terms of
> feasibilty.  If slurs are already pixelated in the output, you are screwed 
> from the start.
> 
> Keep in mind this is still really going to suck if you take time to tweak all 
> your rests and then you find out there is something
> wrong with the actual music, in which case you will have to futz coordinates 
> all over again.

Have a look at the utility XCircuit
http://bach.ece.jhu.edu/~tim/programs/xcircuit/ referenced to from the
web site Sound & MIDI Software For Linux http://www.linuxsound.at/.
XCircuit is a vector based drawing utility for technical drawing with
some additional music libraries. There are samples of music typesetting
from the xcircuit web page.

Regards
-- 
Christian Mondrup, Computer Programmer
Scandiatransplant, Skejby Hospital, University Hospital of Aarhus
Brendstrupgaardsvej, DK 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark
Phone: +45 89 49 53 01