Jan Walgrave m'a signalé, hier, l'existence d'un groupe sur Facebook dédié à la Défense de l'orgue de Saint-Louis .
Je viens de m'inscrire à cette liste, et j'ai regardé avec plaisir les quelques vidéos qu'on y trouve. Ils mettent bien en valeur l'acoustique très généreuse de l'église Saint-Louis-de-France, et les riches sonorités d'un orgue que j'ai eu beaucoup de plaisir à toucher, vraiment.
Un peu à la course, je n'ai pas encore pris le temps de tout lire. Mais je suis étonné par ce que Jan a récemment écrit: "j'attendrai dans le détour certains pontifes qui voudraient me faire taire aussi". Étonnant! Connais-tu vraiment des gens qui veulent te faire taire? Ou s'agit-il plutôt de craintes? Les gens n'ont pas toujours les mêmes opinions, et c'est même souvent fertile. Mais de là à vouloir museler, il y a une marge. Jan, si tu me lis, à quoi fais-tu référence, ici?
Chose certaine, il y a une question de sous derrière tout ça. J'ai survolé dans les archives de ce groupe des suggestions pour la création de lois protectrices et l'établissement de moratoires, mais pour que tout cela ait un sens, il faut en même temps trouver l'argent qui entretient les orgues et qui chauffe les églises l'hiver.
J'ai été témoin un peu de ce qui s'est passé à Saint-Louis-de-France, et suis même surpris que cette paroisse ait pu survivre aussi longtemps, compte tenu de ses très faibles revenus. Personne n'a pu proposer de solution viable pour sauver l'église, et l'orgue. Mais je n'ai pas du tout la fibre de la finance, remarquez, alors mon imagination ne va pas très loin dans ce domaine.
La très faible évaluation de l'orgue, par son constructeur même, m'a décontenancé. L'orgue ne vaut pas beaucoup plus, semble-t-il, que le coût de sa complète réparation. Ou peut-être, plus probablement, que la loi de l'offre et de la demande est telle que le cours de l'orgue, si j'ose dire, n'est pas très élevé de ce temps-ci. C'est un coup dur, mais il faut accuser le coup.
En bref, à mon avis, pour Saint-Louis-de-France, c'est vraiment trop peu, et beaucoup trop tard. Nous allons nous épuiser à vouloir sauver précisément celui-là, et nous fabriquer en cours de route beaucoup plus d'ennemis qu'il nous en faut. Peut-être vaudrait-il mieux identifier plusieurs orgues méritoires qui survivent encore, et trouver maintenant comment les protéger pour plus tard.
Les orgues sont tous uniques et originaux, chacun à leur manière, c'est dans l'essence même de l'art et de la facture. Ils ont tous, forcément, une valeur patrimoniale. Quel que soit l'attachement qu'on leur porte, on ne pourra les sauver tous. Il faut s'y faire. Utiliser une rhétorique remplie de révolte ou de scandale n'aidera pas beaucoup la cause. La pire chose à faire serait de cultiver notre frustration, puis critiquer le gouvernement, l'évêché, la population civile, la population catholique, et tout ce qui bouge ou ne bouge pas.
Il faut plutôt examiner, froidement, calmement, les actions à prendre, sans fanatisme, en examinant tous les aspects de la question, pour au moins prouver à nos interlocuteurs que l'on a les pieds sur terre, et pour mériter aux yeux de tous une certaine crédibilité. Et si des actions raisonnables sont possibles, alors vraiment, vraiment faire plus qu'en parler, ou exiger que d'autres les fassent.
A transient storing device for personal Plus souvent mis à jour : le
mumblings and miscellaneous thoughts
journal Arts et le journal Ordi.
mardi 25 août 2009
dimanche 2 août 2009
Tomboy, Web and maths
Seeing the tomboy-LaTeX add-in for Tomboy, I decided to give it a try. Here are my first impressions.
More it goes, more I use Tomboy for taking notes and organising my work in various ways. Many pages on my Web sites are now Tomboy notes, converted to HTML using my tboy and site.mk machinery. The Tomboy page holds, near its beginning, a few links yielding to other Tomboy-related comments of mine.
Popping an existing Tomboy note, either through the menu of recently edited notes, by following a link from another note, or though the search facility, is easier to me than traditionally looking for a file and calling an editor on it. Slight or moderate edition is immediate and simple within Tomboy. So I converted many of my previous reST or HTML notes to Tomboy, knowing they are going to be easier to manage, while being converted back to HTML of quality comparable to what it was before. Granted that reST is far more expressive, yet I found out that I do not need all of reST power on the average.
I have a few notes, not so many, which are a bit more mathematically oriented, and for which I used a kind of character art for representing the formulas. So, when I recently stumbled on the tomboy-LaTeX page, I felt it might be worth a try. I'm not really setup to compile C# code, and did not succeed at compiling Tomboy from sources the last time I tried, so I feared tomboy-LaTeX might be difficult to install. But to my pleasure, it went rather well: the add-in compiles simply and quickly, independantly of Tomboy itself. The activation of the add-in is also a simple matter.
I initially found tomboy-LaTeX suprisingly speedy. I was expecting worse, given that for each mathematical snippet in a Tomboy note, processing or external programs are needed for generating a LaTeX source, and for turning it successively into DVI, then PostScript, then PNG. But that speed impression vanished when I started using LaTex within real, actual notes. The conversion appears fast enough indeed, but the overall edition crawls to the point of irritation: the cursor often disappears out of sight for many seconds, and inserting or deleting a single character often take a long time. I presume this is related to the number of formulas in a single Tomboy note, but am not sure. However, when there is no or little math involved, like in this very note I'm writing, everything is speedy as normal.
Using LaTeX in my case in only acceptable if it can be extended to automatic HTML conversion, so this was the natural next step. There does not seem to be a universally supported way to embedd images within an HTML page, we can only include references to external images. This means that we need ways for naming each mathematical snippet extracted from Tomboy notes, turning these into images, caching the work already done so to avoid useless regeneration, recovering the cache if it existed already, and cleanup of images which are not needed anymore. Everything being fully automatic, of course.
I'm not overly satisfied with the result, even if is acceptable to a certain extent. See the page choose(n, k) is an integer! for an example, which I criticize at least on these two points:
More it goes, more I use Tomboy for taking notes and organising my work in various ways. Many pages on my Web sites are now Tomboy notes, converted to HTML using my tboy and site.mk machinery. The Tomboy page holds, near its beginning, a few links yielding to other Tomboy-related comments of mine.
Popping an existing Tomboy note, either through the menu of recently edited notes, by following a link from another note, or though the search facility, is easier to me than traditionally looking for a file and calling an editor on it. Slight or moderate edition is immediate and simple within Tomboy. So I converted many of my previous reST or HTML notes to Tomboy, knowing they are going to be easier to manage, while being converted back to HTML of quality comparable to what it was before. Granted that reST is far more expressive, yet I found out that I do not need all of reST power on the average.
I have a few notes, not so many, which are a bit more mathematically oriented, and for which I used a kind of character art for representing the formulas. So, when I recently stumbled on the tomboy-LaTeX page, I felt it might be worth a try. I'm not really setup to compile C# code, and did not succeed at compiling Tomboy from sources the last time I tried, so I feared tomboy-LaTeX might be difficult to install. But to my pleasure, it went rather well: the add-in compiles simply and quickly, independantly of Tomboy itself. The activation of the add-in is also a simple matter.
I initially found tomboy-LaTeX suprisingly speedy. I was expecting worse, given that for each mathematical snippet in a Tomboy note, processing or external programs are needed for generating a LaTeX source, and for turning it successively into DVI, then PostScript, then PNG. But that speed impression vanished when I started using LaTex within real, actual notes. The conversion appears fast enough indeed, but the overall edition crawls to the point of irritation: the cursor often disappears out of sight for many seconds, and inserting or deleting a single character often take a long time. I presume this is related to the number of formulas in a single Tomboy note, but am not sure. However, when there is no or little math involved, like in this very note I'm writing, everything is speedy as normal.
Using LaTeX in my case in only acceptable if it can be extended to automatic HTML conversion, so this was the natural next step. There does not seem to be a universally supported way to embedd images within an HTML page, we can only include references to external images. This means that we need ways for naming each mathematical snippet extracted from Tomboy notes, turning these into images, caching the work already done so to avoid useless regeneration, recovering the cache if it existed already, and cleanup of images which are not needed anymore. Everything being fully automatic, of course.
I'm not overly satisfied with the result, even if is acceptable to a certain extent. See the page choose(n, k) is an integer! for an example, which I criticize at least on these two points:
- The mathematical images maybe aligned either top, center or bottom (which is the default), and best is to center formulas within the surrounding text. However, at least within Firefox, the image is apparently centered with respect to the base line of text, while it would be nicer to center it with respect to the center of text. When the formula does not use more than the vertical width of a line, this is clearly too low, so I tried to use bottom alignement for those, which yields an image which, despite being too high, is less shocking. It is uneasy to decide, while generating the HTML, if a formula uses a single line or not, so I felt back on the naive heuristic of checking if the formula contains any curly brace — which are needed whenever LaTeX coding is a bit more complex — as simple formulas, like variables, do not need any on the average.
- The font used for mathematical rendering is a bit small, and I am not familiar enough with LaTeX for resizing it. For the HTML rendering, I merely reused the recipes found within tomboy-LaTeX source code — all hails to source code! The small font problem is especially noticeable with my
notation. I was not patient enough to try more substantial LaTeX, in view of really using the rendering I hoped for, so this is a compromise. tomboy-LaTeX does not provide an easy way for augmenting LaTeX with one's own definitions, as each mathematical snippet starts with a virgin environment.
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