Re: Fw: PDF Viewing / Updating a score

[Henrik Frisk]

Trent Johnston <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> 
> Firstly the required out the way:
> 
> Platform: Windows XP
> Lilypond Version: 2.7.8
> 
> ____
> 
> I have been using the new version(s) of Lilypond for a while and I find the 
> us of PDF file a little annoying especially when fine tuning a score. You 
> have to remember to close out of the current document before you run lilypond 
> as the current scheme is to delete the old pdf and make the new one. So if 
> you fail to close the score your viewing in the PDF viewer before you compile 
> you receive an error message which means going through the sequence again 
> remembering this time to close the document in the pdf viewer.
> 
> While this is only a minor quible it becomes more noticeable when editing a 
> large score i.e. across many pages. To make a simple adjustment say the 
> padding of slur or dynamic this becomes frustrating as you need to close down 
> the pdf file, make the adjustment and then manually load newly generated pdf 
> back into the pdf viewer and then try and find the page and staff to where 
> you made the adjustment. This can be very annoying and slow down the work 
> rate especially when you are making guesses to padding / layout / making 
> lyric corrections etc.
> 
> I know in the older versions of lilypond a dvi viewer could be used as a fast 
> an easy way to make changes. Since the newer versions only produce a .ps file 
> and .pdf file this it out of the question. I tried using 'gsview' with the 
> .ps file but gsview complains that there too many errors and won't display 
> the music. I use gsview all the time especially when entering music with 
> PMX/Musixtex and can have the .ps loaded all the time and when I update the 
> score it refreshes the screen with the changes made while retaining the same 
> view of the same page I was working on. This makes fine tuning scores much 
> simplier and time efficient.
>
You can still generate dvi output by using the tex backend. I believe
the command is lilypond --backend=tex --dvi but check the manual.

> Is there a way to use the .ps file with gsview I know I won't be able to use 
> point and click but since I usually number all the bars in a score I don't 
> see this as problem and if things get a little tricky I can always go back to 
> the pdf score to find the offending line. I don't use point and click as it 
> is but simply use the pointer to give me the line number to go back to file 
> to find.
> 
I don't use Windows so I can't tell why you're having problems with the
ps output, but I use gv 3.6.1 which works fine with both the ps and pdf
output of LilyPond.