Richard Brown wrote:
I have some TIFF files exported from Sibelius, the music scoring program.
They are just high-quality images of black and white music scores. I tried
converting them to jpg in GIMP for inclusion in my Lyx manuscript, but the
results were awful- or at least, they were awful in lyx. When I open the
converted jpg files in other software they are really clear and good, but in
Lyx onscreen they are very poor and in the dvi files even worse. Many of the
fine lines that indicate musical notes are patchy, and a lot have
disappeared. Has anyone got any good ideas as to how to process this?
First, don't convert to jpg. You can insert tiff files directly in LyX.
While jpg is useful for photos, it is totally useless for anything with
a low number of colors and sharp contrasts. (Screen dumps, line art,
and of course black & white music.)
As others have pointed out, using a vector graphic format like PDF (or
postcript) is even better. The reason: a bitmap image (tiff,png,jpg)
has limited resolution. Therefore, it cannot look good on a device with
higher resolution. Most bitmap images are made to look good on screen, a
quality image looks good even on a really big screen. But that isn't
enough for printing. Even a low-end printer has *much* higher resolution
than the best screens, so bitmap images never gets really good in print.
(Or in dvi, which really is a print preview.)
Vector graphics is completely different. Such files are independent of
resolution. So they work perfectly on any printing device. There is one
exception, and that is when one converts a bitmap into a pdf. The bitmap
doesn't become vector graphics that way.
The only way is to use Sibelius, and get vector graphics from there.
Perhaps it has options like "export" or "save as", where you can specify
a format like pdf or postscript (ps) or encapsulated postscript?
I haven't tried Sibelius, so I don't know. I have test-printed some
music using lilypond though, and have gotten nice results that way.
Helge Hafting
