I'm having difficulties to make M-Tx do what I want with respect to
staff names, for the following reasons:
1) It uses the voice names from the Style command, which means that I
can't use names containing spaces (such as "Soprano 2"), or names
that conflict with M-Tx's line labels, such as "Cornetto". There
would have to be a separate way to specify staff names.
2) It insists on using 12pt boldface for the staff names, which is not
what I want.
3) It always uses a fracindent value of 0.12, which might not always be
what I want.
I can get around 1) and 2) by putting in \setname commands as inline
TeX, but there's no way to get around 3) without hacking the source.
I suggest adding support for a preamble command such as "Indent: 0.08"
to specify the fracindent value to be passed to PMX (independent of the
-n option of PrePMX).
Speaking of which: I think it's a bit awkward to specify the indentation
as a fraction of the line width. I would prefer to specify an absolute
length value. Might this be added as an option in PMX? If the value is
followed by "i", "m", or "p", interpret it as a length; otherwise, as a
fraction as before.
And finally: it is difficult to specify more complicated staff names in
PMX because of line length restrictions. For example, if I need a staff
name spanning two lines, such as
Cornetto o
Violino
, I would have to say something like
\vbox{\hbox to \parindent{\hfill Cornetto o\hfill}%
\hbox to \parindent{\hfill Violino\hfill}}
(on one line), which PMX truncates without warning. I got around this
by saying
\vbox{\box100\box101}
for the staff name, and then
\\setbox100=\hbox to \parindent{\hfill Cornetto o\hfill}\
\\setbox101=\hbox to \parindent{\hfill Violino\hfill}\
as inline TeX, which seems a bit messy.
--
Stefan Haller
Berlin, Germany
http://www.snafu.de/~stk/
