Backend and non-backend (was Re: Stencil bounding box)

[David Feuer]

On 4/27/06, Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> wrote:

> Frankly, I'm a bit mystified why you're spending so much time on
> building the ultimate postscript backend.  The backend is not a
> performance bottleneck. If you think the current PS code is inefficient,
> then you should have a look at the rest of LilyPond.

Could you suggest something else to work on that would be reasonably
easy to understand?

> Yes, but to me this seems hardly related to music typesetting. I think
> it would be in better style to look for a standardized PDF/PS output
> library and offload all of the PS/PDF generation to there. Dealing with
> PS and PDF is a huge sink of developer time, since it tends to turn up
> all kinds of bugs and compatibility problems in
> PostScript/GhostScript/acrobat/etc. It would be a good thing if we could
> outsource that effort to another project.

There's pslib.sourceforge.net.  Not sure that it's any easier than
doing it ourselves.  If you help me refactor the backend as we
discussed a few weeks ago, I'd be glad to take responsibility for the
postscript backend.

David