Manuscript (music) paper support...

[Steve Russell]

I have been looking for a good note-taking app for my Galaxy Note 10.1. Lecture Notes and Quill both very good, but am leaning towards Quill thanks to its more efficient vector-based approach.

I'm also a musician and one thing I'd like is support for manuscript paper. This is relatively easy to do in a couple of different ways in Lecture Notes, but I was intrigued to find that Quill, although it doesn't have support for it, does make its source code available. I've done a fair bit of Java in the past and recently been looking at Android with the intent of writing an app at some point, so it seemed a good opportunity to experiment - particularly as I see someone else has raised a feature request for manuscript.

I have therefore added support for manuscript to a clone of the repository (local on my machine, created using the Eclipse plugin for Mercurial) and happy to make it available. What's the appropriate way to make the changes available?

I'm familiar with SVN, but not Mercurial - there seem to be several options: commit, push, synchronize and merge... not sure which I should use. Or should I just create a patch?

On a related topic - an enhancement would be to insert a clef on each music stave (choice of treble, bass and maybe alto) and also have an option for a grand staff sheet (for piano music). The grand staff is easy to code up, but really would need the corresponding clefs. I think the best way to draw the clefs would be using text characters from a suitable font - but this may need me to provide the characters as I haven't seen the clef symbols in a standard font. I suppose it might be possible to draw clefs from scratch as vectors, too. I'd welcome any thoughts...

Regards, Steve.

[Volker Braun]

Thanks! I have no idea what a clef is ;-)  Posting a patch is fine. Or if you cloned the repo on bitbucket just push your changes to your clone and post a link. 

Small caveat: My laptop just died so it'll take me a bit to catch up.

[Steve Russell]

Not quite sure what happened there... I posted a reply but it was deleted after a short time (30 mins, maybe an hour) - perhaps because it had an image of clefs in it.

Anyway, gist of it was I got the code from code.google.com... didn't find it on bitbucket???

A clef is a symbol found at the start of every line of music that defines exactly which notes are represented by each line and space of the stave... clefs make it easier for written music to cope with the wide ranges of notes from the lowest bass notes from a double-bass to the highest notes from a piccolo. There are a number of different clefs but the treble and bass clefs are the most common. The Wikipedia article for "Clef" has pictures of the G-clef (treble clef) and F-clef (bass clef).

Steve.

[Volker Braun]

You are right, the Quill repository is on google code. Sorry for the confusion. 

[Steve Russell]

Having problems with the Mercurial plug-in... can't even get a patch now. Easiest way is to attach the changed files... only 3, so hope not too much of a problem. One minor issue... the right-hand margin is too big after export to PDF. Haven't thoroughly tested, but seems to work.

Sorry.. Steve.

[Steve Russell]

After more digging around, I discovered that I should have been using an auto-generated password for pushing back to Google... my clone now has the updates. You can see it at https://code.google.com/r/raichea-manuscript/

Steve

[Steve Russell]

On Monday, 18 March 2013 17:55:16 UTC, Steve Russell wrote:

One minor issue... the right-hand margin is too big after export to PDF. Haven't thoroughly tested, but seems to work.

Sorry.. Steve.

I've now checked the other backgrounds and they suffer the same problem... there must be an issue with the calculation of the right-hand margin when exporting to PDF.

Steve.

[Steve Russell]

Looking at the code, I think I would have expected an x coordinate to be set as a fraction of the width, not the height. For example, throughout Background.java, there are statements such as:

        x0 = t.applyX(marginXMm/heightMm);
        y0 = t.applyY(marginYMm/heightMm);

... and the corresponding untransformed calculation in the render_* methods. Whereas I think I'd expect:

        x0 = t.applyX(marginXMm/widthMm);
        y0 = t.applyY(marginYMm/heightMm);

However, I tried this and it failed quite badly (right-hand margin was at or beyond the right-hand edge of the paper).

Without understanding the code better, I don't know what's going on. Can you advise?

Thanks, Steve.

[Volker Braun]

What exactly is the problem, maybe you can show us a screenshot of where the margin is wrong?  I don't quite understand what the expected behavior is.

[Steve Russell]

Ok.. here's a couple of screenshots of the quad paper... one from within Quill, the other the same page but exported as PDF. As you can see in the exported image, the right-hand margin is too large.

Steve.

 

[raichea]

Hi Volker... I put some screenshots on the developer thread a couple of
days ago.

Steve.

On 23/03/2013 13:31, Volker Braun wrote:
> What exactly is the problem, maybe you can show us a screenshot of
> where the margin is wrong? I don't quite understand what the expected

> behavior is. --
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[Volker Braun]

There are necessarily margins if the page aspect ratio in Quill is not the aspect ratio of the paper to export to. I've centered the PDF output, so the left and right margin are the same size.

https://code.google.com/p/android-quill/source/detail?r=da029d9bceebd578672c656cd70db313e1282a14

[Steve Russell]

Doh! I forgot to check that... the paper was set to screen size and that obviously isn't the same aspect ratio as A4, which is what I thought I had set it to :(. Sorry if I sent you off on a wild goose chase... However, centring the output is a great idea anyway, so I hope it was useful after all.

[Steve Russell]

Hadn't checked the main code source for quite a while. Pleased to see you found the music paper useful enough to incorporate. Thanks!

Steve.