Re: gnome-print and GnomeCanvas

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico redhat com>]

>  A friend and I have started writing an interactive music typesetting
>  program.  It's written entirely in scheme, using the gnome-guile
>  bindings.  (Yes, we love scheme.  No, our app is nothing like
>  LilyPond.) :)

Fantastic!  It would kick ass to have a GNOME program to do
high-quality music setting.  Elliot, Owen, and I had thought of such a
thing, and Elliot even wrote some code for it (it is in the GEM module
on cvs).

>  *  The ability to install a real music font

Lilypond's font seems to be very nice.  You may want to use it.

>  *  The ability to use this font on a GnomeCanvas Widget

What we wanted to do for the music setting program is to use an
antialiased canvas to have an extremely high-quality display.
Caveats:

	- The AA canvas is buggy.  I'll finish fixing it in the
          CANVAS_CLEANUP branch on cvs when I have time.

	- You would want to use something like the GnomeCanvasBPath
          item in gill, or GnomeCanvasHackText.  Ideally you want a
          font engine that does glyph caching; talk to Raph about
          this.

If you look at the gill module on CVS, you'll get a good idea of what
you can do with the AA canvas and fonts.

>  *  The ability to make the GnomeCanvas widget dump postscript

This is not really what you want to do.  You should use the
gnome-print API instead.

If you know how to create your canvas items that represent music
glyphs, then by definition you know where things are and you can print
them just as easily.  Also, you'll get better output since you can do
stuff like print page numbers and such (which makes little sense to
have in the main canvas view).

I'm very happy that you are taking on this project.  You may already
know about it, but I recommend this book:

	http://people.redhat.com/federico/books.html#music-notation

My ideal music program would support absolutely everything in that
book:-)

  Federico