A few replies to a few emails...
Hi Chris
You wrote
> Thanks; I will give it a try and see. I haven't had a lot of luck with
> TeX, though; I tried to build and install on my system, and it failed
> miserably. :) (I'll try a Linux machine next and see what happens).
Under Windows I have had no problems with MikTek, the Gnu Tex/Latex
distribution. In case, get in touch with me outside the list. Meanwhile,
have a look at the MusixTex user guide, page 28 and page 29 - that should be
the solution to your problems.
Ciao Andrea
Come sopra: contattami direttamente.
Hi, Laura
You wrote
>There are people (including the principal maintainer of MusiXTeX)
>doing a lot of good work in PMX, which is an ABC-like preprocessor,
>which nevertheless allows a lot of control over the look of the
>output. There are also people extending LINUX-based sequencers to
>export it, and recent versions will export MIDI. So I think it's
>starting to be the answer to a lot of things.
>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 assume that the preprocessor to the preprocessor you have mentioned is
Musixlyr,which is in fact not really user friendly. I assume you have never
tried M-Tx, the one Christophe Declercq suggested, which uses the Musixlyr
package, but offers an input language
that's even easier than the one adopted by PMX, has been designed to insert
lyrics in a PMX file, and under Windows is easy to install (you have to copy
the binaries in the folder you prefer!). Well, in fact this is not the first
time I
talk of M-Tx on this list. I even posted a couple of weeks ago
a tune in both abc and mtx notation for comparison - as usual, it got
ignored (I guess, as far as the abc notation is concerned, that the Dead Sea
Scrolls are a more relevant matter fot the subcribers!).
In fact the mtx notation might seem a bit confusing for those that are used
to the abc, but once you got the hang of it - i.e. you learn to think in
relative rather that absolute note pitches - (and here, I firmly disagree
with Christophe), in terms of human readability it's not second to it, at
least for easy scores. For complex scores in turn, with multivoices and
extra lyric lines, let me tell that I find mtx better than any suggestion I
have
read about the V: lines inclusion in the future abc standard.
I agree with Christophe when he states that the database structure of an abc
file is excellent to "store, search...tunes". I would ask him to read again
what I wrote, though - I wasn't suggesting that WE should convert from abc
to mtx, but only that A CONVERTER to a full featured typesetting package
would be helpful. And I mean helpful for those that have the need
(occasionally or extensively) to print complex scores with features that,
even if quite common in printed Western music scores, the abc notation
standard doesn't cover, and therefore the native amatorish abc software
haven't implemented yet (although, since the future developments of the
standard seem to be in the hands of the minority of developers that
monipolize this mailing list, we could easily tell the opposite is true as
well - only the new features that will be experimentally implemented in
those softewares are likely to enter the standard!). Given this, we could
store, swap, upload on the web our tunes... in abc format, and resort to the
converter when we need a printed score.
By the way, I haven't noticed the PDF files produced by Tex are ugly to read
with the Acrobat Reader: I usually prefer to use Ghostscript, both to view
and print PostScript files. Anyway, they probably look perfect once printed
(as the PDF files produced converting the PostScript files obtained with
Acrobat Distiller drivers with GosthScript), which I suppose is what people
usually do with music scores). That they are heavier files, I couldn't care
less: when abc2ps and its clones will offer me the same feature musixTex
currently does, this will be something I will consider. So far, in
comparison we are to a scarce third: no match at all!
Anyway, Laura, have a look at the M-Tx user guide, and I am sure we will
find matters for further discussion.
Regards
Gianni
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