ADLER1@BRANDEIS.BITNET (09/22/87)
After following the helpful and encouraging advice I received from many people over the net in reply to my earlier message "learning", I have succeeded in making some sense out of SMG. Now my problem is the inherent limitations of SMG. Apparently SMG does not give one resolution beyond the character level and that means that fairly simple displays ( such as a musical staff) take up about half the screen. I am informed that there are other graphics facilities which work on the VT240 terminals here such as picsure and others but I am also advised that none of them allows one the ease of updating the display from the keyboard which SMG provides. Is that really the way it is? Basically what I want to do with the graphics is to write a simple user-friendly program which will let one enter music and words from the keyboard to a staff (actually a few staves) on the screen. It would be ok to represent a quarter note by a "q", a half by an "h", etc. Text could also be added below the staff. It would be the job of the program to find all the notes and text and place them in some form in a text file for further processing by other programs. I believe this can be done using SMG but SMG gives one so little room to work with on the screen that it probably isn't worth it. Isn't there some other way to do it and fit,say, four staves on the screen which can be updated from the keyboard? I understand that using ordinary characters for notes may rule this out but if a package would let one work conveniently at the pixel (or sixel ?) level, other symbols (maybe even notes...) could be used. It doesn't have to be beautiful: it just has to be a convenient way to enter music into a file. Any suggestions? ADLER1@BRANDEIS.BITNET