Jack Campin writes:
>
> ....[ the difficulties of using y to align staves ]....
>
>In theory a TeX-based system ought to obviate this kind of problem, as
>TeX uses elastic boxes, ugliness scores and heuristics to optimize its
>layout, and if an abc-to-TeX translator left TeX enough options that
>could be put to use. Has anybody hacked abc2mtex to deal with stuff
>like multiple voices or text underlay?
>
I'm sure nobody's done this yet, but it would be possible, and one
should end up with something which will produce handsome staff output,
with all of the advantages and flexibilities of TeX to help out. After
all, MusixTeX is designed to do exactly that. For lyrics alone, there's a
package called musixlyr.tex which will do a good job, tho it might require
a little tweaking to make it work. (Excuse me if I'm a little vague
here---it's been several years since I looked at this, and I've forgotten
the details.)
My feeling is that one can do quite a bit by writing a script to
act as a preprocessor for abc2mtex. Abc2mtex actually has multistaff
capability, tho it's pretty well hidden---it's a bit of a hack that Chris
Walshaw added as a temporary solution until he could solve the problem in
full, but it seems to work pretty well. The problem is that it is very
hard to enter the abc for this, and twice as hard to proofread and correct
it. And the result is not human readable. But it does work. I've used it
a couple of times, but only when I *really* needed to. However, I think
one could write a script to take abc with different staves and voices, and
put it in a form that abc2mtex can handle.
I did look at the problem of multistaff music for abc2mtex in some
detail, and I thought it would be quite possible to modify abc2mtex to
handle it. I wrote a note which explained the problem and gave a number
of examples which showed the tex code which abc2mtex would have to write
in order to do lyrics and multistaff music. It was on sourceforge, but it
seems not to be there anymore.
By the way, musixtex uses tab stops (&) to align notes; Chris'
hack is simply to put the tab stops in the abc, and then pass them
directly on to musixtex. Hmm...I wonder: is it too late to simply use y as
a tab stop?
Cheers,
John Walsh
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
