I haven't messed with music in pdf enough to be sure if it can happen, but if a staff line is only a single row of pixels then simple-minded algorithms can sometimes drop the row altogether and that is a complete disaster.
Incidentally, I make sure that I keep the master copies of the music for our band BOTH as hard copies and as electronic files (Muse rather than ABC, but the principle is the same). One favourite trick of ink-jet printers is to develop a blocked jet and this can do horrible things to horizontal lines of staffs. You tend to notice them at gigs when you suddenly realise the music is unreadable. Top or bottom lines are deadly, but the in-between ones are pretty bad too. I thought that photocopiers were immune to this, but I recently went to a workshop where the chap who ran it (Dave Brown) had printed one master copy of the music and photocopied it many times to hand out to the participants. He described it as a "high quality" photocopier. It must have been a really high-tech one that rasterised the image. It also must have had the page horizontally aligned to high precision because it managed to lose staff lines. On one page you could actually see the line fading out as it went across the page and on another (presumably later) copy of the same page there was no trace of it at all. A little mis-alignment would have worked wonders! I know this is pretty tangential to ABC, but I thought it might be of interest. Laurie ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Chambers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2002 6:07 PM Subject: Re: [abcusers] "Embro, Embro" CD-ROM Phil Taylor wrote: | Acrobat Reader doesn't understand music, and (for example) doesn't know | that staff lines MUST be equally spaced. If (as usually happens) the | spacing of the staff lines doesn't fit the pixel spacing it tries to | make up for this by antialiasing them, so they come out fuzzy and different | thicknesses. All of which is irrelevant if you print on a high resolution | printer, but it looks bad on screen. This is a problem with boh Acrobat (acroread) and Ghostview, and probably with any other PS or PDF viewer. It took me a while to discover why music looked so awful with ghostview. Finally I tried turning off the antialiasing (though I didn't really have much of an idea what that did), and then the music looked really nice. It does have a problem on a small screen or small window, with staff lines not quite evenly spaced. But this is better than what antialiasing does to the staffs. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html