Some of you may recall my issue with adding extra vertical space between 2 staves of a single instrument. I thought some might be interested in a few more details of that saga.
I'm using PMX to typeset a composition by a friend for handbells, SATB choir, and piano. It has 6 staves per system. Ideally it would be 3 instruments with 2 staves each. But I needed to add extra vertical space between the two vocal staves, and MusiXTeX evidently has no mechanism to do that if the two staves are in the same instrument. So I went to 4 instruments, with 2 for the vocals. I also wanted bar rules not to cross the space between instruments, and at least at first, I did want them to cross the space between the two vocal lines. But \sepbarrules wouldn't cut it, because that stops barrules from crossing spaces between all instruments, which now included two separate ones for the vocals. So I went to musixdbr to get that. Coming up with inline TeX was complicated by the fact that the score starts out with 6 staves, but the handbells are out for the first half of the piece, so I took the score down to 4 staves starting with the second system, then back up to 6 when the handbells came back in. In PMX that's done with new movement commands. Without all the gory details, I did succeed in getting it to happen, but it was very, very complicated. The was partly due to the complex way that PMX does new movements.it relies on a command \newmovement, defined in pmx.tex. The command temporarily redefines \startpiece and \contpiece, so I couldn't simply keep the PMX new movement mechanism while redefining \startpiece and/or \contpiece the way I wanted to to activate the right musixdbr options in the right places. In the end, after spending several hours getting the kinks out, I had what I was aiming for. But then I started thinking that maybe I didn't really want the barlines to span the space between the two vocal staves, and sure enough, in the examples in Read's book, that's the way it was. So that basically put me back where I started: with 4 instruments and \sepbarrules, there was no need to resort to musixdbr and all that ugly inline TeX. What's the moral of this saga? At one level, I could have saved a lot of effort by realizing earlier that by convention barrules don't cross between adjacent vocal staves. But at a deeper level, life would have proceeded a lot more smoothly if MusiXTeX had been able to add vertical space between two staves of the same instrument. It's a bit of a mystery to me, considering all the things that are possible in MusiXTeX, why you can't do that. --Don Simons
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