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From: ladasky@codon2.berkeley.edu (John Ladasky;1021 Solano No. 2;528-8666)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: NOTATOR vs. FINALE (mac)
Keywords: productivity
Message-ID: <1989Dec5.030219.3596@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 5 Dec 89 03:02:19 GMT
References: <4739@blake.acs.washington.edu> <1989Dec4.213025.14837@agate.berkeley.edu>
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In article <1989Dec4.213025.14837@agate.berkeley.edu>
laba-1aj@web-1d (John Kawakami) writes:

[stuff about printing speed of NOTATOR deleted]

>I realize this is probably not the right forum for this, but here goes:
>    Over and over, I read people who point out how  s l o w  PS is. 
>Sometimes, they are justified; PS is pretty slow if it has too little RAM,
>a very complex image, bad code, etc.  But usually, people blame postscript
>when the program generating the postscript is at fault.

	When I got into the scoring business, the only Atari notation package 
around that generated PostScript files and could read MIDI files was Dr. T.'s
COPYIST.  I can tell you this much:  COPYIST generates about 250k of data 
per page.  The Sonata font (which, I'm sorry to say, is more aesthetically
pleasing than any of the Atari laser fonts I've seen) is another 75k.  I print
my files out from my UNIX account, and they take about 10 minutes per page.
One thing that I have noticed is that pages with lots of slurs (which cannot,
I would imagine, be implemented by characters of the Sonata font) take up 
considerably more memory than those without them.

>    Now, I don't know anything about Finale, but I don't think something
>as simple as a page of music should take more than a few minutes to print
>(yes, that _is_ slower than the SLM; heh heh).  I suspect Finale is doing
>one of two things: producing ugly, horrendous PS; or letting the printer
>figure out how the page should be set and giving it just enough info to
>let it grind the page out.  I'd bet my mother that it's the former.
>

	I'm almost certain that my files are being transferred to the printer
by something niftier than the 9600-baud serial port that I've seen - and it
still takes 10 minutes.  I've archived a few of my PostScript files and they
tend to compress by a factor of FOUR or FIVE.  This suggests that there is a
fair amount of verbosity or redundancy in PostScript.  Sure, it's great to
be able to read the stuff, but someone should consider the fact that a 
protocol for the transfer of a ters, more compressed version of PostScript 
would speed things up quite a bit.  I'm not sure how inelegant the COPYIST
PostScript code is, but my guess is that it's not all that bad.  At least, 
it's about as ugly as the code that the FINALE user seems to be generating.

T CROSS POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS POLICE LINE DO NOT CR
_______________________________________________________________________________
"Do unto others as you would like		       - John J. Ladasky ("ii")
 to do unto them. " Richard Bach		  (ladasky@enzyme.berkeley.edu)