Status report: This whole thing came up when I was trying to implement Bob's
tremulos into PMX. Their definitions include a beam start command
\ib...{note} inside an hbox. PMX's pitch tracking mechanisms assumed
(wrongly) that when an alphabetical note with ' or ` was used there, the
octave transposition would be remembered. As a work-around, I reprogrammed
PMX to use numerical pitch levels in the beam start command, and that worked
fine.
Except...I wondered what would happen when I transposed a piece. Would the
tremulos appear in the untransposed location? Well, the answer is no, they
were transposed just fine. I hadn't remembered this, but it turns out that
when PMX transposes, it doesn't use \transpose. Instead, it internally
calculates the transposed pitch levels, and those are what musixtex gets
directly. So with transposition, PMX was calculating the numerical position
of a tremulo based on an already-transposed pitch for the main note.
Long story short: I no longer see any immediate advantage to changing the
way musixtex handles ` and '. Since AFAIK no one else has ever raised this
issue, I'd suggest avoiding the risk, and simply including an edit in the
next version of musixdoc.
--Don
> -----Original Message-----
> From: TeX-Music [mailto:tex-music-boun...@tug.org] On Behalf Of Don
> Simons
> Sent: Friday, February 24, 2017 8:03 AM
> To: 'Werner Icking Music Archive' <tex-music@tug.org>
> Subject: Re: [Tex-music] globalizing ` and '
>
> How risky is this for backward compatibility? I'll try to do some testing.
> The first thing I'll test is whether the proposed changes make ' and `
fully
> global, or if on the other hand the musixdoc description would still apply
and
> the effect would still be restricted as described there.
>
> --Don
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: TeX-Music [mailto:tex-music-boun...@tug.org] On Behalf Of Bob
> > Tennent
> > Sent: Friday, February 24, 2017 7:47 AM
> > To: tex-music@tug.org
> > Subject: [Tex-music] globalizing ` and '
> >
> > According to musixdoc.pdf,
> >
> > These characters have cumulative effects but in a somewhat
> > restricted sense. They will alter the value of \transpose,
> > but only until changing to a different staff or instrument
> > or encountering \en, at which time it will be reset to the
> > value it had before the accents were used. (That value is
> > stored in another register called \normaltranspose).
> >
> > In fact, with current musixtex.tex, the effect of these characters
> > will
> also be
> > undone automatically if used within a { } brace-pair or an \hbox. This
> would
> > seem to be incorrect behaviour and I'm proposing making the changes to
> > \transpose effected by ` and ' to be "global" and undone only as
> > described
> in
> > musixdoc.
> >
> > Comments?
> >
> > If anyone wants to test the proposed changes, here they are:
> >
> > \def\@ndstaff{\egroup\transpose\normaltranspose ...
> > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ \def\xgetn@i
> > :
> > \if '\t@ruc \global\advance\transpose\s@v@n \C@Get \fi
> > \if `\t@ruc \global\advance\transpose-\s@v@n \C@Get \fi
> > ^^^^^^^
> >
> >
> > Bob T.
> > -------------------------------
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> > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
>
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