Vector touchup

[Jeff Henrikson]

> 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.


Jeff Henrikson