Re: gnome-print and GnomeCanvas

[Ben Collins-Sussman <bsussman inso com>]

Federico Mena Quintero <federico@redhat.com> writes:

> >  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).

Yes, there seems to be an overwhelming response from people for this
program.  We've really hit upon a niche, it seems. :)

A number of folks have volunteered to work on this, which is great.
We're gonna wait till we at least have some basic working alpha code
before opening up the devel process, though.  (But we *have* made the
project anonymously viewable through our CVS server for now -- see
http://www.red-bean.com, the project name is "bkscore", and it doesn't
do much yet.  We've been using the GTK canvas up till now.)

> 
> >  *  The ability to install a real music font
> 
> Lilypond's font seems to be very nice.  You may want to use it.
> 

Looking at it now.  It's a nice .ps file;  I haven't quite figured out
how to convert it into .pfa/.pfb/.afm files to place in my Type1/
subdir.  I'd like to make it into a regular X screen font somehow.


> 	- 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.

Fantastic!  Will do.


> 
> >  *  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).

You make a lot of sense here.  Is gnome-print mature enough to use
yet?

Thanks for the advice.