Dieter Gloetzel and I have been working together to identify (both of us) and fix (Dieter) some issues in XML2PMX.
One (admittedly rare) problem we found occurs when the PMX score produced by XML2PMX has more than 10 slurs + ties going across a page break. We traced it to a limitation in Stanislav Kneifl's postscript slur package. Although Stanislav is hesitant to actively re-engage in MusiXTeX programming after 10 years of absence, he did provide some pointers. By mimicking the existing patterns of register allocation in musixps.tex, my limited knowledge of TeX then allowed me to bump that up to 14 but no more. Given etex's massively enhanced register capacity over the older version of TeX that Stanislav used as a basis, we're wondering if anyone on the list with a deeper understanding of TeX would be willing to dig into this and try to bump it up further, to 20 or 30 or more. Please contact me if so. I've encountered another slightly related matter that raised some interesting points. For performance purposes, I'd like to use PMX to make a harpsichord part for Bach's 5th Brandenburg movement II that has more legible figures than the only figured one I could find on IMSLP. I naively thought maybe I could save a little effort by finding an XML file of it and using XML2PMX to get started. I couldn't find one, but I have found both a MIDI and a Finale file. I also found a free program MuseScore 2 that can convert MIDI to XML. I succeeded in importing the MIDI into MuseScore, but quickly realized something that seems to render any further effort along this track pointless. Any MIDI file with any sophistication at all (including those produced by PMX!) will have built in gaps between successive notes in the same voice, even if there's no rest in the source. But MuseScore doesn't know how to deal with that fact, so it dutifully puts in lots of 64th and 128th rests into the exported XML file. FWIW XML2PMX could not handle that, possibly because PMX can't really do 128th rests. As for the Finale file, MuseScore won't input it, and I don't know of any other free S/W I could use to convert it to XML. The good news is that the movement is not very long and making the PMX from scratch will not be too difficult. --Don Simons
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