Private reply by Dirk, forwarded with permission:
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Subject: Re: Staff names with M-Tx (and PMX)
From: Dirk Laurie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Stefan Haller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 11:52:28 +0200 (SAT)
Stefan Haller wrote:
>
> 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.
>
You can use "Soprano~2". It's a bug that "Cornetto:" does not work.
But I agree, it would be cleaner to distinguish between line labels
and staff names. A preamble line specifying staff names would make
the -n option unnecessary.
> 2) It insists on using 12pt boldface for the staff names, which is not
> what I want.
I'll change this to a symbolic font name that the user can override.
> 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).
The reason I haven't done this is because this fraction business is too
opaque for the philosophy behind M-Tx. I agree 100% with your following
comments.
>
> 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.
>
What I really would like is for PMX to calculate the indentation to
be just enough for the labels. This could be done mainly at the pmx.tex
level.
Dirk
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--
Stefan Haller
Berlin, Germany
http://www.snafu.de/~stk/
