Hi all! > De : Laura Conrad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date : samedi 20 janvier 2001 13:47 > > >>>>> "Laurie" == Laurie Griffiths <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Laurie> Gianni Cunich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Laurie> extolled the virtues of "MusixTex". > > Laurie> If it really serves the purposes of many users, I am sure that > Laurie> it will soon come to dominate the scene, with or without > Laurie> pre-processors. > > No, you haven't looked at it. It won't dominate the scene if people > have to type and edit it directly. You are right! [...] > The big reason I can't tell you more from personal experience is that > most of the music I'm interested in is vocal music, and you need a > preprocessor to the preprocessor for that, which I've never managed to > install correctly. I have M-Tx here on my Windows box and it's really easy to run. The language is easy (not that far from abc) and can use lyrics in an easy way. The M-tx -> PMX -> MusixTeX -> dvips road can seem clumsy at first sight but, with a little batch script, it is very fast: anyway, faster and more reliable than Lilypond. > I might add that abc2mtex was the original ABC application, as well as > one of the early MusiXTeX preprocessors, so if you don't need the > recently added features of ABC (like multiple voices and lyrics), you > can experiment with MusiXTeX output without learning a new input > language. Yes, but the note spacing algorithm in PMX is far more elegant. > One of the reasons I'm encouraging this is that I'd really love it if > someone would update abc2mtex to include the newer features. John > Walsh has done some preliminary investigation, which is on my list to > post the results of some day. Another route to investigate would be > an abc2pmx translator. Perhaps, an abc2M-Tx would be simpler (for lyrics use). IMHO, as it is, abc is really better than PMX and M-Tx in 2 aspects: [1] easy note entry and easy reading: PMX and M-Tx use pitch coding relatively to the note before, which is sometimes fast to enter but is always harder to read and edit. [2] the database structure of tune files, to store, search... tunes. and, even if the current multiclones situation is not really easy to grasp for a beginning user, abc2ps makes direct postscript output (which makes beautiful PDF, an easy way to send tunes to non abc litterate music friends: they are still numerous). Type III fonts produced by MusixTeX take a lot of place (PDF file size) and are very ugly to read in the current state of Acrobat Reader. And the library of PS music symbols build by Methfessel for abc2ps is really not bad! Happy abcing! Christophe To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
