Re: New option for OOoLilyPond: PDF to SVG

[Carl Sorensen]

On 10/30/19, 9:35 AM, "Klaus Blum" <address@hidden> wrote:

    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

The two big issues I saw were font embedding and clipping the bounding box.  It 
seems like we ought to be able to adjust both of those in the svg output.

Would it be possible to modify the effects of lilypond-book-preamble.ly on .svg 
files?

    
    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, ... ?

It seems to me that fixing lilypond svg output to match what we want would be a 
better approach long-term than trying to integrate the call of a pdf->svg 
converter.

Nevertheless, calling the converter appears to be an immediate workaround.

Carl