New option for OOoLilyPond: PDF to SVG

[Klaus Blum]

Dear OOoLilyPond users, 

I'm planning to add a new option to OOoLilyPond. 

At the moment, we only have the choice between three file formats: 
- PNG is a bitmap format with the obvious quality drawbacks. 
- EPS can only be used with OpenOffice (not LibreOffice) and cannot be
displayed on screen. 
- SVG offers good quality but requires quite some tweaking (described in 
http://lilypondblog.org/2018/02/ooolilypond-part-2-optimizing/
<http://lilypondblog.org/2018/02/ooolilypond-part-2-optimizing/>  ). Most
obvious drawback: You cannot use lilypond-book-preamble.ly

PDF would be the ideal choice for an output format, but LibreOffice cannot
(yet?) import PDF files with satisfying quality. 

Now (why did I take so long?...) I had the idea to call an external program
to convert LilyPond's PDF output into SVG which then can be imported into
LibreOffice. 
Most obvious advantage: You can work with any template, just like it works
with PNG and EPS. No need for dedicated SVG templates.
My first test look very promising. 

In Linux, it seems to be quite easy: You can use pdf2svg which can be
installed with any packet manager. (Am I right?)

With Windows, it looks (as always?) more complicated: 
We need additional software capable to perform a command-line conversion
from PDF to SVG. It must be installed by the user, and OOoLilyPond needs to
know the exact command line to be called. 
In a forum post ( http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=30252
<http://www.inkscapeforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=30252>  ) i found that
Inkscape cannot yet do that, but there is a "standalone" version of Poppler
that can be used: 
http://blog.alivate.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/poppler-0.68.0_x86.7z
<http://blog.alivate.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/poppler-0.68.0_x86.7z>  
While I still don't know whether to recommend a software that I don't know,
I've tried it and it performs allright.

For Mac, I don't have any idea. My knowledge about Macs is exactly zero.


Am I still missing something? Do you have any more thoughts, ideas,
recommendations, experiences, ... ?

Cheers, 
Klaus




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