Slowness in displaying scores

Posts about Padrucci and IMSLPDroid.

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gardano
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Slowness in displaying scores

Post by gardano »

Folks,
In some cases, scores can seemingly take a long time to render and draw to the iPad screen.

This is due to a number of issues, almost always due to the way the score file was created.

When a score is scanned, there are several options the scanner has available:
* Bit Depth (will it be black and white, or with grays, or in full color?)
* File Size (are there many pages in the score, should it be broken up into several separate files?)
* Compression (If using Acrobat, should it be saved with a smaller file size?)

If the file has been scanned with a high depth (grays or color), and with compression (smaller file size), a bug in iOS may kick in. iOS has to decompress the file *in memory*, and THEN use whatever memory is available to draw the images to the iPad screen. Here is the nub of the problem. That additional memory needed to decompress the PDF can result in slow drawing & rendering times, or can even result in a crash of Padrucci itself!

Padrucci has a button which lets you send an email to report a problem with a score. It's specifically there for the above problem. Over time, eager volunteers can resave the PDFs without compression, and/or split up into smaller file sizes, and if need be, lower the resolution. Once that is done for a "problem" score, Padrucci will be happier, and those downloading the score from http://imslp.org will be happier.

Think of this as a great opportunity to make each and every score at IMSLP the best quality possible!

--Gardano
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