graphic pasting question

[silvermoonbeam]

Hello Mellel users,

I have been using (and loving!) Mellel for several months, which I'm using for a lengthy book project. I have been pasting musical examples and full pieces I've typeset with Sibelius 4 (music notation software). The results have been absolutely great.

Sibelius has recently issued a major upgrade, which I purchased. I tried to continue with my work but when I paste a graphic into Mellel the results are horrid (although it prints fine).

I've learned on the Sibelius forum from the Sibelius moderator that Sibelius 5 copies both a PDF and a PICT version of the graphic to the clipboard whereas Sibelius 4 only copied a PICT version.

Mellel must be grabbing the PDF version. Is there any way to instruct Mellel to take the PICT version of the graphic and not the PDF version?

I confess that this all sounds odd to me—having two versions of something in the clipboard—and I don't understand it. There's no option in Sibelius to choose which format is copied to the clipboard and I can't find anything in the Mellel preferences that might help.

I have figured out a workaround, but it use to be so easy (select, copy, paste)!

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Christopher

[Mart°n]

Mellel chooses PDF over PICT because PDF is the slightly better format. There are a lot of applications that copy their content to the clipboard in multiple formats to increase the chance for the destination application to use at least one of those formats. Pasted from the release notes of Mellel 2.1:

2. Improved image type selection when pasting. When multiple types of images are present in the clipboard Mellel will choose the type according to the following priority list: PDF, PICT, TIFF, anything else

Different from your experience I haven’t found a problem when pasting a PDF compared to a PICT image so it would be helpful if you could describe what exactly is horrid with the PDF image (display quality, speed, crashes…?)

[silvermoonbeam]

Martin,

Thank you for your response. I just wrote a rather lengthy message referring to an image I figured I'd be able to post, but now I find the message board doesn't support images directly and I don't have access to server on which I can put it.

The PDF version of the graphic has wavy beams, illegible notes, inconsistent staff lines, and is illegible (if you remember, I'm dealing with notated music). The PICT version is clean, sharp, and highly readable. There is no performance slow down with Mellel, it's just a visual problem. The same thing happens in TextEdit, MSWord, and Nissus Writer Pro (beta).

The Sibelius support person suggested that a word processor would have an option to select which version was in the clipboard (he suggested "Paste Special"), but I haven't found that to be so.

Both versions seem to print fine, but as I am writing about these pieces of music, it's more pleasurable and helpful to look at what I'm writing about on the screen as I write.

/christopher

[Mart°n]

I just wrote a rather lengthy message referring to an image I figured I'd be able to post, but now I find the message board doesn't support images directly and I don't have access to server on which I can put it.

If you like, you could send the image to mellel(at)martin-stadtmueller.de and I could look at it (and upload it to my server if necessary).

The PDF version of the graphic has wavy beams, illegible notes, inconsistent staff lines, and is illegible (if you remember, I'm dealing with notated music). The PICT version is clean, sharp, and highly readable.

I’ve seen a similar problem with pixel images (tiff, png, jpg). Mellel displayed them fine if they were copied and pasted from another application but they were displayed without anti-aliasing (very pixelated) if they were inserted via drag & drop. I’ve done some tests but couldn't verify the same problem with PDFs on my Mac. I’ve drawn some lines in OmniGraffle and copied (OmniGraffle has a copy special menu where you could choose to copy as PDF, Tiff, Pict, AppleScript) those lines as PDF and as PICT and pasted them into Mellel. Both versions were fine, no matter how large or small I scale the images in Mellel.
As a second test, I’ve downloaded some scores (not done with Sibelius as I couldn’t find one) from: http://www.dimitrisandrikopoulos.com/sc ... sommer.pdf
and
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/kv315f.pdf
opened them with preview and copied and pasted some parts into Mellel. Everything looked fine. Inserting those PDF into Mellel with drag & drop also worked flawlessly and the results look quite good.

So maybe there’s a problem with the PDFs generated by Sibelius or theres some difference between your and my Mac. I use a (not so new) G4 PowerBook with OS X 10.4.9 and Mellel 2.2.5 (have to update to 2.2.5.1).

The Sibelius support person suggested that a word processor would have an option to select which version was in the clipboard (he suggested "Paste Special"), but I haven't found that to be so.

As Mellel chooses the (in theory) best format when different ones are available, there shouldn’t be a need to select the format manually. I think the problem you see lays elsewhere and a paste special submenu only would be a workaround but not a elegant solution.

Both versions seem to print fine, but as I am writing about these pieces of music, it's more pleasurable and helpful to look at what I'm writing about on the screen as I write.

Fully understandable. If you could send me a example PDF, I could do some more tests.

[DylanMuir]

Some PDFs also contain a preview image, which can be displayed quickly without rendering the PDF completely. Word has the problem that it displays (and PRINTS) that preview image, and cannot be made to print the vector data itself.

This is pure speculation, but it could be the case that Mellel, although it chooses the PDF data in preference to the PICT, displays the low-resolution preview rather than rendering the PDF, yet prints the PDF correctly. The original poster said that printing quality is good.

DRM

[silvermoonbeam]

Martin,

I'm sending you a JPG screenshot as well as a one-page Mellel test file. Perhaps the problem lies with Sibelius 5, as you've not been able to reproduce a similar problem using other (non-Sibelius) graphics. Perhaps Dylan is on to something and that Sibelius somehow "encourages" Mellel to display the low-resolution preview PDF.

/cb

[nicka]

Perhaps Dylan is on to something and that Sibelius somehow "encourages" Mellel to display the low-resolution preview PDF.

And if so, then stripping out the preview should make Mellel display the pdf itself. You should be able to do this as a batch process on all the pdf files in the package of a Mellel file, providing you can find a suitable batch processor.

[Ori Redler]

Hello Mellel users,

I have been using (and loving!) Mellel for several months, which I'm using for a lengthy book project. I have been pasting musical examples and full pieces I've typeset with Sibelius 4 (music notation software). The results have been absolutely great.

Sibelius has recently issued a major upgrade, which I purchased. I tried to continue with my work but when I paste a graphic into Mellel the results are horrid (although it prints fine).

I've learned on the Sibelius forum from the Sibelius moderator that Sibelius 5 copies both a PDF and a PICT version of the graphic to the clipboard whereas Sibelius 4 only copied a PICT version.

Mellel must be grabbing the PDF version. Is there any way to instruct Mellel to take the PICT version of the graphic and not the PDF version?

I confess that this all sounds odd to me—having two versions of something in the clipboard—and I don't understand it. There's no option in Sibelius to choose which format is copied to the clipboard and I can't find anything in the Mellel preferences that might help.

I have figured out a workaround, but it use to be so easy (select, copy, paste)!

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Christopher

Hi Christopher -- It seems to me that the choice should be offered with the originating application (Sibelius, in this case) as Mellel (and other applications) can't tell where the info is coming from. Still, you might try to approach our support with a question about this.

Ori

[Mart°n]

Sorry for being late.
I have received the example Mellel document and have seen the same problems (the first image [PDF] being pixelated due to the lack of anti-aliasing, the second one being perfect [PICT]). Interestingly, Sibelius doesn’t copy vector-data (curves) into the clipboard but bitmap data (pixel-images). Both, the PDF and the PICT contain a high resolution pixel image and both look the same when viewed in Preview or opened with Photoshop. You can also see the pixels, if you change the zoom level to 800 or 1600%.
This leads to two conclusions regarding your problem:

1. Mellel has a bug because it displays pixel-images that are inserted in some formats without anti-aliasing (which causes the images looking ugly). It’s the same bug I’ve found out with TIFF-Images mentioned above. I’ve reported this during the 2.2.5 beta test. As this is behavior could easily be reproduced, I think the chances are good that the bug will be squeezed out with the next version of Mellel (but as I’m not one of the developers, this is a guess only). Both images are displayed fine in Pages and ZeusDraw but OmniGraffle has the same problem.

2. It’s kind of strange that Sibelius copies pixel-data into the clipboard instead of vector-data. This not only means a decrease in quality but also an increase in image-size and therefore an increased Mellel file (if you paste a lot of images). While this is not a bug, you could ask the Sibelius support anyway why they do this and if it could be changed. If Sibelius could copy vector-data (resolution independent) the images would be displayed perfectly in Mellel no matter if they use the PDF or PICT format.
I also wonder what the makers of Sibelius thought when writing this paragraph:

Elegant layout

Sibelius's unique page layout means that you won't have to worry about spacing, formatting, or how your score will look when it's printed. The music is beautifully laid out onto pages for you as you work – you don't need to think about it.

If you look at your scores at the high zoom level, you could see that they are far less elegant than one could imagine. But that’s another story. As a workaround you could try to print your scores from Sibelius and then click the “save as PDF” button inside the print window. Maybe the put out the high quality vector format here (try to zoom in with Preview or Adobe Reader, you couldn’t see pixels at the highest zoom level, the output seems to be a vector format). If so, you could drag the freshly created PDF into your Mellel documetn and it should be displayed as good as the PICT.

The bug in Mellel should be fixed anyway.

[silvermoonbeam]

Martin,

Thank you so much for this information. I don't know what goes on behind the scenes when a computer handles graphics and so don't always know the questions to ask. I have a query in to Sibelius support and this gives me a good idea of how to follow up with them. This is incredibly helpful! If I learn anything of interest from them I'll post it here.

I wonder if there are other many othe Mellel users who paste notated music into their documents…

/christopher